On the subway, there was a lion of a man, tall and large, who had the bearing and beard of a Viking warrior. Yet there was also something small and soft about him. He had a bulging belly, his visage was bathed in blue light, and he spent the whole trip flexing only two parts of his body—his thumbs.
At one time, such a man would have spent his days tilling the fields and, oh, what a farmer he would have been. How glad he would be to sink his teeth into bread fashioned from grain grown through the work of his hands.
But now who knows what sort of desk job he may have or what sort of pleasure he can draw from his fare. He is not a grower or a fighter. He is a viewer, a consumer.
The next day, I thought again of this man as I, momentarily carless, had to walk half a mile to the grocery store with my backpack laden with groceries for my family on my return journey. The burden on my back and the exertion of my legs carrying food for loved ones felt good, meaningful.
Today we obsess over working out. Running on a treadmill or in a big circle around our neighborhoods, lifting weights, doing yoga, training for marathons. Anything to get our bodies out of a state of inertia and on the path to exertion. Yet if we are honest, we might realize that there is a touch of desperation in these activities. They are artificial and in some ways pointless. The fruit is fitness and not fruit.
Descartes predicted all of this at the start of modernity. He said the new philosophy—he erroneously called it a “practical philosophy” when in fact it is a technical one, having little to do with praxis or moral action—would make us masters and possessors of nature. The advantage, he promised, would be threefold: in medicine, mechanics, and morality. In medicine, to prolong our lives indefinitely; in mechanics, to free us from toil; and in morality, to make us content.
Of these, the gains have come principally in prolonging life (though arguably not fostering health) and especially, without a doubt, in making machines to free us from toil.
While the first waves of machine technology enervated our bodies, this one threatens to cut even deeper and enervate our souls.
These machines are amazing. Complex, intricate: There is not a task that they cannot do and do better than a human laborer. No longer do people have to spend hours over the washboard or churning butter or grinding grain; no longer do people have to spend hours in the fields or fashioning things. Instead, all we need to do is run our machines and call someone if they happen to break down.
Why do we want these machines? They save us from toil, and that is a great good. But do they go too far? Do they take from us something else that might be dear to us?
Free from Labor
At first, our machines saved us from toil. No longer did we have to wrack ourselves with mind-numbing pain to wrest sustenance from the earth or to make that sustenance palatable. Then machines saved us from labor. No longer did we have to work against the resistance of matter with our hands, and no longer need we put one foot before another to take ourselves where we would like to go: Tractors, automobiles, and factories serve everything up to us in easily digestible packages.
The unintended consequences of machine technology are obvious: We are now sedentary creatures, our muscles withered, and our stomachs overgrown, whose natural occasion for exercise is limited to walking from the elevator to the parking lot. Yet not too many of us would trade in our posts in factories and offices to be back under the sun on the farm day after day, plowing and churning just to have bread with butter. Our limp frames may just be the price we are willing to pay for this convenience.
Until now we could still hold the line, however. We could turn inward, to the life of the mind, for the satisfaction of production. We could spend our time dreaming up new machines and procedures. We could problem-solve when they broke down. We could think, create, innovate. This was left to us. How proudly have we boasted, “Manufactured by machines but designed by us humans.”
Yet our machines today are accomplishing another revolution, one saving us from the effort and skill of creating and making. Bedazzling us with their powers, AI machines are able, at our very command, to spew forth splendid images, catchy music, and even surprisingly passable student papers with zero effort on our part. While the first waves of machine technology enervated our bodies, this one threatens to cut even deeper and enervate our souls.
There is a lot of alarm but not yet about the right topic. What will become of education? We still teach math by hand even though there are calculators, because calculation without understanding is meaningless; and so, in the same way, we must still teach writing. What will become of democracy? The threat is real but just another iteration in an era of social media and robocalls. More importantly, what will become of us humans?
Gaping Holes of Consumption
If we outsource even our creativity, if we are no longer creators and makers, what are we reduced to? It’s simple, really. We become the one that chooses something from the available options and somehow takes it in. We do not make food, but select it from the aisle or the menu and gobble it up. We do not create art, but choose what we like from what we are given or specify what we like to be produced and then enjoy it. Our ability to choose, to exert our preferences and to find satisfaction in doing so, finds free rein. Instead of freedom to draw from nature or to fashion what we will, we have freedom to select what occupies our time. We are the mouse-clicking or thumb-tapping viewer of the spectacle unfolding before us.
It is astounding, what is at our finger tips. We are better off than royalty in ages past. King Saul summoned David to play his harp and cheer him up. Each of us with a device can summon legions of musicians at any moment. In this way, we are all monarchs surrounded by technological servants whose only aspiration, it seems, is to keep us well pleased or at least distracted.
But in yielding to this urge, what do we become? Consumers, not producers. We become the animal that binge-watches, binge-eats, and binge-consumes. And despite all this binging, we are not full. We are instead hungrier than ever.
Hegel identified the hidden nihilism of this endeavor. Consumption is fleeting, since it is based on something temporary and accidental: pleasure. Production, by contrast, is enduring, since it involves our investing the material world with our thought.
The art we view, for example, can be seen and gives pleasure, but for the artisan it is a source not only of pleasure but also of pride and self-understanding: I am the one who fashioned that. Michelangelo, scandalized that others attributed the Pietà to someone else, carved his name across the Madonna’s sash: Michelangelo of Florence carved this.
Anyone who has ever created anything, be it a book, a poem, a plan, or a dish, knows that it is not only a matter of our sense of self but the very savor of life that is at stake. David with harp in hand knows a joy that Saul listening to him cannot know.
If we together embrace our vocation to create, we can replace those empty hearts and bloodshot eyes with joy and clear vision.
As Plato observed, life craves creativity and procreativity. To create involves a divine enthusiasm, a participation in a higher order of exaltation, which renews life. To create is to discharge lightning bolts as though one were Zeus or Thor. It is also among the greater things one can give: to turn primordial soup into something steeled with order and intelligibility.
Rekindling the Flame
We humans gain nothing in trading mind-numbing labor for mind-numbing consumption. Both kill the same human spirit, for both drive the life out of us and consign us to an empty state of exhaustion. Yet if we together embrace our vocation to create, we can replace those empty hearts and bloodshot eyes with joy and clear vision.
There are some signs of renewal and thus of hope. Friends smoke meat and brew craft beer. Some delight in yardwork without power equipment. Some dare to camp without electronic screens. Others forgo the ease of AI generation and not only write on-screen but occasionally reach for pen and paper; still others do the same for images, brushing paint on canvas or rubbing graphite on paper.
These are signs of a different relation to nature and to our own bodies: To restore to our living frames something other than pushing buttons—to restore to our hands the joy of handicraft and to our soul the elevation of creativity.
What’s more, part of authentic enjoyment is the thought of the chef, artisan, painter, or writer who brought this into being through skill and labor. There is thus greater enjoyment possible of things fashioned by us, even if they are imperfect, than of things coughed up by anonymous processes, even if they are flawless. As every parent of a young child knows, the influx of soul into even imperfect creations is the deepest source of appreciation.
Today we are on the verge of realizing a wish, or half wish, made at the start of modernity. Would that there were nothing more for us to do. Yet that wish makes our bodies little more than life support systems for our consciousnesses, which are always on the verge of boredom, and it makes our consciousness nothing more than a gaping hole—one that simply cannot be filled.