What Is The Machine?
This essay is the last in a series by The Savage Collective. You can read the first entry here.
There are many stories that attempt to describe what it means to be modern and how we arrived at this period in human history that we call “modernity.”One of the most pervasive stories about modernity is the story of secularization and desacralization. The story goes like this: for much of history, human beings constructed myths about the purposes of the cosmos. Such myths had been extremely important for human cultures. These myths were constructed largely to help people make sense of a chaotic and unexplainable world. These myths, which coalesce into a cultural “mythos,” held within themselves the basic values that organize and guide human and civilizational action.
The modern secularization story tells us that we no longer have need of such myths at all. Now that we have reason and science, we can leave these superstitions behind. We can explain more and more of the world around us in technical terms. We no longer need to worship the gods, and we no longer need fairy tales. The throne where the gods once sat is empty. We can now focus on harnessing reason and science to reduce suffering and increase prosperity.
Hephaestus and assistants create the shield of Achilles. Pompeii fresco.
Through the destruction of these old myths, we sense that we have demythologized the world. The problem is that this is false. As we discussed last week in our essay, What is Human Flourishing?, we know that human persons are embodied spiritual beings. Our spiritual nature longs to orient our lives around something beyond ourselves—something that is worth our esteem. In praxis, we are worshiping beings, and the nature of worship is to incline our lives to some mythos and story through which we gain meaning, purpose, and coherence. As David Foster Wallace says in his famous commencement speech, This is Water, “Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
If this is the case, the story of modernity is not so much that we have expelled the gods and their throne sits empty, but rather that it has been filled with a new god—a new unifying mythos. Many great thinkers have written extensively on the nature of the entity that now sits on the world’s throne, the nature of the myth that orients human action. Writers including Lewis Mumford, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, and R. S. Thomas called this new mythos “The Machine.”
The Savage Collective's understanding of The Machine is guided deeply by the writings of Paul Kingsnorth who spent nearly two years articulating and exploring the nature of The Machine. You can view his writing on the topic at his Substack The Abbey of Misrule. In many ways, we are attempting a 2,000-word distillation of what Paul spent years and hundreds of thousands of words exploring. Paul summarizes his writing on The Machine here. We also understand that these essays are being turned into a book.
The Values Inherent in the Machine
Mythoi are stories or frameworks that carry within themselves a society’s core values. Again, The Machine mythos tells a story of moving beyond old myths and harnessing the power of reason and science to usher forth a new, utopian future. Through our endless capture of information and advancements in technology, we will initiate an irreversible age of affluence, plenty, and peace. Like any good mythos, The Machine goes by many names such as “progress” and “growth.” Crucially, it does not claim to be a mythos at all, but simply a description of reality.
This utopian future faces many obstacles. The world around us is filled with contingencies and limits. These contingencies and limits are all around us, baked into the natural world and even into our own bodies. Our ability to usher forth this utopian future is threatened by seasons, borders, chance, and biology. These contingencies and limits must be overcome.
The mechanism through which we overcome these contingencies and limits is control—ultimately, human control over nature, including ourselves. These contingencies and limits bring a certain uncontrollability to the world. We must make every effort to make controllable the uncontrollable. As Hartmut Rosa says in his book The Uncontrollability of the World, “The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable.”
How precisely does The Machine mythos suggest that we can execute this control? This control can be accomplished through the accumulation, organization, centralization, and application of natural and human resources. The Machine must bring into itself the world's natural resources, including fossil fuels, water, and air. It must also bring into itself the inherent resources of human persons, namely the unique capacities that we discussed in our previous essay. These resources include consciousness, agency, ingenuity, creativity, and love. These capacities are extracted, accumulated, organized, and operationalized for the purposes of The Machine.
How Does The Machine Take Form in the World?
Heretofore, we have conceptualized The Machine as an ethereal force. It can be thought of as an orientation of the heart of the modern man toward control and accumulation. But this ethereal force takes actual material form in the world. How so? Human communities tend to organize their institutions around their central animating mythos. These institutions reinforce this mythos and organize human aspirations and actions to advance the mythos’ purposes. Likewise, within a Machine age, we arrange our most basic institutions of public life around The Machine’s value of accumulation and control. We can see around us the ways in which the central institutions of the state, the economy, universities, and technology are organized to promote and reinforce these values.
Lee Krasner, Rising Green (1972)
It is important to understand that these institutions must work together for the Machine to properly function. It is not so much that the workings of these institutions are expressly coordinated (although they often are). It is more that they are mutually guided by a shared mythos of The Machine such that they work in tandem. The state and its rationalized bureaucracies work to bring more and more of our lives into its purview. Those responsibilities that were once within our own agency, or of the family, have been outsourced to the state, corporations, and various experts. Childrearing is handed over to psychologists and parenting experts. Social assistance is moved away from mutual aid and handed over to corporate and state welfare. Self-produced music and storytelling is handed over to expert musicians and Hollywood. The economy is oriented to the extraction and accumulation of capital beyond the purview of human beings. Technology likewise serves the accumulation and control of our most basic capacities and motivations, moving agency outside of true humans and human communities.
The Uncontrollability of the Human Person
The most limiting factor in the success of The Machine is the human person. The human person with its complex set of motivations, drives, and loves make us a particularly uncontrollable entity in the world. Therefore, the success of The Machine mythos requires our implicit cooperation. Our capacities and motivations, and by extension our lives, are a resource that feeds The Machine. But, to help the Machine, we must prioritize the worth of efficiency over value, entertainment over leisure, and comfort over suffering. Sure, The Machine does satisfy many human needs, but only to the extent that it benefits The Machine. It is the needs of The Machine that are paramount, not those of the human being. We will talk much more extensively through the life of our Substack about what The Machine takes with one hand as it gives with the other, particularly within the context of labor and working-class life.
For the sake of the objective
We end this essay with a poem. Wendell Berry, agrarian essayist, novelist, and poet, has referred to The Machine as “the objective.” Listen here how he describes this drive within The Machine toward control over all things and the need to overcome limits, accumulate resources, and, ultimately, subordinate true human capacities and motivations to that end. See if you can sense in this poem what it feels like to live your own life within The Machine.
Brandon Daily is a writer, diesel mechanic, and autodidact. He runs a small, family truck repair and breakdown service in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He has a Master's Degree in Religion and tries to read books and drive cars that are much older than he is.
Grant Martsolf is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. Formerly, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, Grant is a social scientist with particular interest in how the transformation of labor from primarily manufacturing to service (especially health care) has impacted the lives of working-class men.