This is the second of a four part series on the economy of everything. Part One talks about the disastrous creed that is ‘growth for the sake of growth’. Part Two below discusses how this resulting network of manipulatory power warps our souls. Part Three is a call to repentance and right worship. And Part Four puts forth a vision of a better way.
A Machine Made of Human Parts: The Economy of Everything, Part Two
Call it what you will — a system of oppression; a collective delusion; demonic possession; the Antichrist. Whatever it is, it’s turning the world into one big “global Gomorrah.” We are its inhabitants. Like it or not, we are shaped by it. The Machine makes servants of us all.
In the previous post, we saw that markets serve a purpose. Free markets don’t deserve reflexive disdain, nor blind worship. The same market forces that are invaluable for allocating scarce resources are also easily gamed. In fact, we’re not nearly as in control of things as we like to think. We hug ourselves for being “liberated” while we become increasingly dependent on the services of large corporations. We find ourselves powerless to stop the ‘junkification’ of everything. It’s as if humans are being remade to fit the economy. But man wasn’t made for the economy. The economy is not some impersonal force for efficiency or a lever of control. It’s communal. It’s relational. But now the work done by the vast majority of modern people is illegible. We’ve abandoned the real economy for a global economy built on a vast network of deficit economies untethered from the constraints of the real economy of scarcity. It’s an attention-based economy manufacturing desire and dissatisfaction. It’s a system that treats corporations like people and increasingly treats people like machines. The single-minded pursuit of an economic utopia warps our souls. Practically every spiritual tradition in history warns us of this.
A Vast Network of Manipulatory Power
As participants in this system we share a degree of responsibility for it. By adapting to the system we help perpetuate the system. We are both its victims and its instruments. There is no police state forcing this on us. It’s a self-perpetuating system accountable to no one. The fact that few even notice it is all the more concerning. The philosopher of science Michael Hanby postulates that under a truly absolute totalitarianism we wouldn’t even be aware that we are being coerced. Certain truths simply wouldn’t be perceptible; certain ideas couldn’t be thought; and certain experiences couldn’t be had. Nobody would even notice that something was missing.1Michael Hanby, A More Perfect Absolutism, First Things, October 2016 The Machine is the posttotalitarian “network of manipulatory power” that Václav Havel wrote about. It’s the result of an “unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity.”2Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
A Secularized Religion
This “Machine” isn’t just some vast soulless mechanism for accruing material wealth. It is itself a sacred object. It’s comparable to a secularized religion, with metaphysical and existential certainties that cannot be accepted only in part. The English writer Paul Kingsnorth concedes, “We have not junked a sacred order for a profane one. We have instead enthroned a new god, and disguised its worship as the disenchanted pursuit of purely material gain. We have dressed up as a mere ‘economy’ our new idol and sovereign: the Machine.”3Paul Kingsnorth, Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, Divining the Machine Part One
The ideology of the Machine is the liberation of individual desire. It sees boundaries as barriers rather than as an edifice holding back dangerous floodwaters.4And the flattening of cultures through interconnection and globalization puts more and more areas at risk when the tide predictably sweeps in. A core tenet of its faith is “that braking boundaries leads to happiness”5Paul Kingsnorth, Want is Acid, Divining the Machine Part Seven Scientists represent the new priesthood. Science provides a claim to authority and the pretense of objectivity. God is superseded by a method. Instead of following God we must “follow The Science.” And this center of power becomes synonymous with the center of truth. There’s a deep desire to know the world in order to bend it to our will.
This is a religion rooted in the will to power. It says, “I am the autonomous ruler of myself able to define right and wrong.” In other words, man is not just free to obey or disobey moral law, but to choose which moral standards he adopts. “Do what thou wilt is the motto of our world: the motto of the Machine,” says Kingsnorth, “Thy will be done is its older brother, and its challenger.”6Paul Kingsnorth, Do What Thou Wilt, Divining the Machine Part Five
Kingsnorth sees this as a religion with a deep faith in rational organization that is underpinned by a utilitarian commitment to ‘Reason’.7Paul Kingsnorth, A Thousand Mozarts, Divining the Machine Part Three The Machine sees Earth-as-mechanism, world-as-factory, and life-as-commodity. It reduces personal worth to an exchange value. It’s an ideology built on remaking nature for human needs. It inevitably ends up remaking human nature. Skills are downgraded and subverted into algorithms, as Iain McGilChrist says, as “we are busy imitating machines.”8Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary “Humanity can no more survive the mechanistic revolution intact than can the forests or the oceans.”9Paul Kingsnorth, The Green Grace, Divining the Machine Part Four
Lewis Mumford chronicled the rise and triumph of this system of power and technology in his two volume work entitled The Myth of the Machine. He predicted that instead of acting as an autonomous personality, man would become “a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalised, collective organisations.”10Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, published in two volumes between 1967 and 1970 Fifty years on that prediction seems as prescient as ever.
The Machine breaks bounds, destroys limits, and homogenizes everything in pursuit of growth. It must conquer space and time, speed transportation and communication, increase industrial productivity, and over-stimulate consumption. Conquest and expansion are its essence. The Machine is anti-limits and anti-form and thus anti-nature and anti-human. We’re told there is no realistic alternative.
Homo economicus
Living in the Machine narrows our horizon. We end up separating markets from their social and religious contexts. We begin to view people as commodities. Their labor is separated from the products their labor produces. Friendships become transactional. Networking is something we do intentionally for the purpose of manipulation. It’s truly a transformative way of viewing people and nature in purely utilitarian and individualistic terms. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this new species of man Homo economicus.11Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Vintage, 2013 Corporations are staffed with such people. We all know them. They are the self-interested employees far more keen on looking good and getting promoted than on building a company that meets the needs of others. Companies, in turn, must employ expensive monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to motivate these self-serving employees to act in ways the company desires.
Homo economicus embodies the “narrowing of the intellectual and spiritual horizons of a human being” that Solzhenitsyn warned us about in The Gulag Archipelago. Homo economicus forgets that man is more than just matter; that he has an essential nature. And that nature involves a unity of form and content, a person who is body and spirit indivisible. It’s a whole from which the content cannot be subtracted from its form and be left with anything resembling what it was. Homo economicus is the de-evolution of man. Man becomes a beast simply responding to economic stimuli. He’s both the product of the system and also a cog within the Machine. The Machine caters to his pleasure centers, motivating him to spend and spend to keep it all going.
It’s a machine made of human parts. People are more or less interchangeable. And it doesn’t really matter where people work or raise a family. If a factory closes and the town dies the inhabitants can simply move. Because growth and efficiency are the only things that matter. We’re expected to cut ties with family, friends, and place to seek something economically better. Because to the Machine one place is indistinguishable from another. Everyone becomes economic migrants. The idea of moving for better opportunities is nothing new. But Chris Arnade reminds us, “People have long moved for jobs. This has been done before — the dust bowl, the northern migration of African Americans. Yet those were a reaction to failure, not a sign of success.”12Chris Arnade, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, Sentinel, 2019
We fail to recognize any value not assigned by the market. And so it makes sense to pursue a degree in a field that takes us to another city. It makes sense economically, but at the same time it severs ties with the people who know us best. It uproots our sense of place. We have no way to account for the cost of leaving thick familial relationships. We’re unable to speak intelligibly about the value of home. So we hand over the economic life of our communities to big corporations.
In this system, relationships are fungible. We learn to hedge our commitments. As Patrick Deneen observes, we adopt flexible relationships in which bonds are weak and subject to constant redefinition. This applies not just to our personal relationships, but also our relationships “to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion.”13Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2019 He points out that it’s no surprise we now have a mortgage industry, no longer based on relationships developed over time and place, that closely resembles college hookups involving random encounters between strangers.
Neocolonialist Appetite
The Machine is a globalizing force. Instant gratification is the organizing principle. This promotes an anticulture dedicated to ‘growth’ and the promise of ‘happiness.’ Want is a solvent so powerful that it can dissolve centuries of our cultural inheritance; ancient forests and oceans, great faiths, nations, and traditions; the very things that make a human life. “Want is acid,” as Kingsnorth says.
The result is a world of junk food, junk sex, and junk entertainment that depends on insecurity, gluttony, and obsolescence to perpetuate itself. And in pursuing these things we accrue levels of debt that turn us into economic slaves. We have no choice other than to do the work that the economy prescribes for the wage it sets. The Machine converts the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into paid wage laborers.14A critique of the bourgeois class made by none other than Marx and Engels
When only a few people own everything, as is the case with communism and increasingly with the type of corporatist capitalism now practiced, the few are in a position to dictate to the rest of us how we are to live. Similar to the creatures in George Orwell’s Animal Farm that keep repeating “Four legs good, two legs bad,” we’re programed with the mindset that “open is good, closed is bad.” Open is good because opening makes possible the systematic concentration of land and resources into fewer and fewer hands. “Closed things can’t be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. Open things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”15Paul Kingsnorth, Come the Black Ships, Divining the Machine Part Eight
Opening up is not something that happens organically. Obstacles like the peasantry, the artisans, common spaces, local traditions, family life, the sense of history and mutual obligation, and religions preaching against wealth and power must be uprooted, as Paul Kingsnorth reminds us, so the priest-captains of the Machine can get on with the work of our time; “the holy effort to which all human will, skill and energy is now bent: making money.”16Paul Kingsnorth, Want is Acid, Divining the Machine Part Seven
We quickly find our temporal horizons narrowing to exclude knowledge of the past and concern for the future. We become so ensconced in the Machine that the only solutions we can see are technological or bureaucratic. Kingsnorth notes how the Machine even captured the environmental movement. “A movement which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialise the global food supply, track and trace our consumption patterns and promote a vision of ‘sustainability’ that would make any Fortune 500 company smile.”17Paul Kingsnorth, Blanched Sun, Blinded Man, Divining the Machine Part One This techno-colonialism introduces poor so-called ‘backwards’ people to traffic jams and enlightens them with Twitter and TikTok.
Now that we’ve framed the problem, it’s time to start thinking about what a proper response looks like. The next post will begin our movement in that direction.
Photo Credit: “Machine” by AMagill is licensed under CC BY 2.0