Deneen on technology, culture and modernity

Here's a terrific, long, thoughtful new essay by Patrick Deneen in The New Atlantis, meditating on the connection between technology and culture, and how in our time technology has become anti-culture. The essay defies easy summation, but you get a sense of it below. Wendell Berry's critique is at the core of Deneen's own argument in this piece. Georgetown is so fortunate to have a young scholar like Deneen on its faculty. And we are all fortunate that he's such a pellucid writer, because he has a lot to teach us. Excerpt:

Lying deep at the heart of this division of use and care--the opposition to nature--are philosophies that reject the idea of the bounties and limits of nature, philosophies that regard nature chiefly as an obstacle to the fulfillment of our desires, that dismiss the lessons of culture to moderate our desires in light of the limits of local conditions, that elevate human comfort and wealth above other ends, and accordingly not only stress our opposition to nature, but to cultures that developed alongside local natural conditions. Francis Bacon called for a change in humanity's relationship with the natural world, to view nature as an enemy and to understand the human mind as a weapon. In describing the modern scientific project, he charged us to understand that "knowledge is power," and at points described nature as a kind of prisoner withholding precious secrets from us, justifying our extraction of those secrets even by torture, if necessary. Following Bacon, we have transformed technology from ways of using nature that nevertheless coexist with nature--that "care for what we use"--to ways of exerting human will and fulfilling human desire in spite of nature and therefore, ultimately, in spite of culture.

It has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture. Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance.

My grandmother could do most of the things on this list. And by many measures, our time would regard her as uneducated or look upon her as "simple" in spite of the variety and the complexity of things she knew how to do. But if the lights went out tomorrow, she would have been the smartest person we know; she (and not our college professors) would have seen us through. She's gone now, and much of that knowledge has been laid to rest with her because, by the time of my generation, we didn't need to know those things anymore.

Some people might respond to this list with perhaps a modicum of regret, wishing at least that we could track--that would be cool--but also recognizing that we don't have to. After all, we have handheld GPS gadgets for getting around, industrial agriculture for food production, cheap clothing from China so that we don't have to make or repair garments, cheap labor from Mexico so that we don't have to build or fix, and the Internet for everything else. But this is precisely the point: within roughly two generations we have lost a vast storehouse of cultural memory that was the accumulation of countless generations who saw it as their duty to posterity, grounded in gratitude to ancestors, to ensure safe passage of this knowledge to future generations. Culture itself has come to be viewed as disposable based on the illusion of independence from nature that our modern technologies have bequeathed us. Why spend time diligently learning at the side of your father how to repair a bucket or navigate by the stars or grow vegetables when every young person knows that a machine will do this work--or that cheap replacement products are readily available?