The Orderer of Things
He sits beside his friend on a bench in September before the lockdown. She’s wearing a light wool black coat and carries a brown paper bag full of food from the grocery store. There is cheese, turkey baguette sandwiches, a bag of chips, and cold green seedless grapes. They enjoy the sun that is bright and warming, yet, she points out, there is no UV risk since it’s late in September. With his two eyes he can see her face, the contours as she moves her head to emphasize certain things she is saying. There is depth of field: he can focus on the grape he’s about to put in his mouth, the foliage behind his companion, the grass leading to the seawall, the rocks passed the seawall that run down to the ocean, and finally off to the far distance across the sparkling bay.
I sit in my study looking at a monitor trying to make words appear in a document to order my thoughts. I’m surrounded by things: a plastic clock, pens, a computer, a printer, a desk, books. My eyes focus 30 centimeters away on a flat screen but I try hard to remember that day on the seawall. I contrast my ability to name the things in front of me with my ability to name the things that particular lunch. What are the things made of, what stuff are they. A grape made of grape-flesh seems more real than the plastic material that makes up a pen. What is the truth of a grape? It’s reality is so multifaceted and it’s long history so mysterious and rich. In comparison, a pen is a clumsy invention, an ugly mass produced unnatural rod of plastic full of ink. A thing a child could make compared to a grape.
And yet with mere pens we invented literature, law, science, math, engineering. And from these words written on pages we have made a taxonomy of artificial things. We spend our life surrounding ourselves with these childlike things. We call it technology to try and imbue our things with a special status. We made these from our minds. But who did? Not us. What have you invented? You might as well also claim responsibility for creating the cedar tree, the coho salmon, or the tiger lily. There is a difference in these two things. We should have inherited the things on this earth as caretakers, or sustainers. Instead our caretaker, Nature, is dying because of the childish things we inherited, re-create and fetish over.
We sit in our rooms with our glowing screens placing order on our lives and the lives of others. We use our childlike things to order, whether consciously or unconsciously, the complex beauties of the world. Our knowledge flows like a transforming water through the world: it turns forests into furniture; rivers into electricity; prehistoric life into plastic. These technologies that we have inherited have even become too complex to understand. We now rely on intuitive user interface so that we may operate the complex systems in our days. We become removed from the systems layer by layer like peeling the skin of an onion to reveal some deeper field of knowledge we would need another lifetime to fully understand. (Ask a pilot what they know about fabricating a plane, or mining metals.)
And though we cannot make natural things, we try and try again to improve and invent more childlike things. And for what purpose? Have you ever had a moment where you wonder what it is you do? How are you helping? Or are you merely solving problems that we inherited from our movement from the past to now. That is if you are lucky enough to have some occupation that gives you a feeling of a larger purpose in the world. What is that larger purpose? Most of us have to do what we do out of necessity. Most live in poverty because of this “grand purpose” we have.
The truth of the grape is that it tasted the same as any grape I’d eaten in the last 10 years because it is essentially a clone. It was designed as food to reproduce without the ability to reproduce so that I don’t have to eat a seed. Grown on a land that was plucked of all other life. They were sprayed with pesticides created to kill any other life that might want to taste it first. They were grown in another country, warmer and with more sunlight than the one I live in. Picked and packed by the poor. Refrigerated and flown to a store near me that sold thousands of other groceries designed and preserved with the latest technologies.
Now it’s November and I cannot see my friend. We are asked by the local health authorities to stay with our families to prevent the spread of a pandemic. Ah, but this technology will save us from a very Natural problem. Isn’t that the miracle promised by vaccines? Vaccines seem like one of those inherently good technologies, except that they are profitable endeavors for pharmaceutical companies. It’s not that we are incapable of making good technologies, it’s that the underlying motivation of all innovation is profit. Profit doesn’t have a very good track record.
To see my friend we have to text, or talk on the phone, or maybe have a video call. It’s made me realize how much I rely on technology to “be” with my friends. I notice the lack of sensations when I am with someone virtually than when I am with them in person. Walter Benjamin called this lack, this distance created by technology the loss of someone’s or something’s “aura.” It’s strange to be with a friend and at once relieved you can see them and comforted by their virtual presence and yet at the same time miss their aura. Only because it is so necessary and global do I now notice this deficiency we impose on ourselves. And it is a deficiency that we have been weaned upon by the technology, a technology we inherited.
From whence did we inherit this diminishing aura? Was it from the invention of social media? The invention of the internet before that? The television? Nay, surely it was the radio, the telephone, the printing press. It seems like it was progression. It progressed to now and we were born into it. I used to think of unfortunate souls who were born before things. It must have been terrible to be born before vaccines, before anesthetics, before the internet, before labour unions. But we can also sympathize for people born into things beyond their control. How privileged that we are born into a world where people have all but forgotten how to be in the world and with each other. But wouldn’t it be nice to be born after this disconnected world?
Look around from your language-cage. Every named thing has a purpose for us: a utility. Everything in Nature has potential to be a resource. Our minds make tools of what our eyes cast their gaze on, we even have names for things we cannot see but that help us order things more efficiently. Where are the words we forgot? We must have at some point enjoyed saying those words. Those things that were so essential in the past that got replaced by our current language-painting of the world. What new words will we invent? What company will become a verb? I’m loath to know.
I only feel I can glimpse at some satisfying conclusion to this endeavor, so complete is the language-painting of the world. It is not turning away from technology or STEM nor merely looking at the world as an environmentalist or artist. All of our points of view will serve technology in some way. We have chosen technology as a way to save us from the problems that our creation of technology has caused. No longer are we under the illusion that the world is too vast for us to change with our order, but this realization has come at a time when we are becoming anxious about our chance of survival. Our libraries of knowledge have not revealed truth to us, they have revealed the falseness of our pursuits: that instead of ordering technology, technology now orders us. Look how we make childlike systems and things at the expense of mysterious and beautiful ones.
