About 25 years ago, a good friend and I created what we called “the axiom”: “The future is always worse than you think it is going to be.” It began as a sarcastic and self-depreciating joke about how we were becoming middle-aged cranks before our time. Nevertheless, we were capable of amassing a significant amount of evidence in the axiom’s defense.
P. D. James’s 1992 novel Children of Men imagines a future in which, for some unexplained medical reason, no babies have been born, world-wide, for 20 years. James describes how nuts this makes people, especially women. They start having birthday parties for their dogs and cats. They call themselves pet “parents,” put their pets in strollers, and congratulate each other for owning such adorable animals. You can see the axiom: James needed a mysterious medical disaster in order to make such a scenario believable, but it has more-or-less come true without one. The future is worse than we thought it was going to be.
In the 1980’s, it was a commonplace of the paranoid right to worry that the government would insert microchips into us or tattoo barcodes onto us in order to track our every movement. In the novel 1984, when Orwell imagines the government spying on everyone, he imagines them mandating two-way screens in every home. In both cases, we predicted that tracking and surveillance would require an immense expenditure of government power and that people would acquiesce only for fear of the consequences of not doing so. But what has actually happened? Everyone voluntarily carries around an extremely sophisticated piece of surveillance equipment and allows it to moderate their access to information. Fear and force were basically unnecessary: we all bought smartphones just “cuz”—because they were new, because we liked funny videos, because it felt pleasant and powerful to be able to waste time scrolling and prodding at a screen. Depressingly, people don’t really care about freedom. The future is worse than we thought it would be.
We used to talk about designer babies. The idea was that, in the near future, scientists would be able to manipulate the genes of babies in utero or the genes of their parents’ gametes in order to produce perfect children. Want a boy? Easy. Want blue eyes? No problem. Tall? We can do that. The 1997 movie Gattaca was based on this premise. But the way in which we have actually come to “design” babies is very different. We produce 10 or 30 embryos in the lab, see which ones have which traits, pick the one we want, and kill the rest. In Gattaca, everyone was healthy because everyone was “designed.” In reality, diseases like Down Syndrome are all but eradicated because anyone who is suspected of having them is killed. The future is worse.
Since the 1950’s we have imagined that, in the future, we would have flying cars, jet-packs, and spaceships of all sorts—as in Back to the Future, Blade Runner, or almost any sci-fi movie produced before 2010. Our reasoning was obvious: people like going places and they would invest their resources in getting more of what they liked: vehicles that would allow them to go places faster, easier, and with greater freedom. But what really happened? Instead of developing machines to send us zooming through the world, we invented the world of the screen, where a crummy, manipulative version of the world flows into our heads without us having to get out of bed. This has resulted in strange phenomena: teenage drinking has decreased, teenage premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births are way down, teenage car accidents, crimes, and arrests are no longer a significant social problem. Every negative consequence of adventure in the real world, even childhood bone fractures, is fading. The objectives of conservative-leaning social workers have been achieved by a universal simulation of youthfulness, wonder, transgression, and risk. Again, the future is worse.
We used to think that the progressive march of ever-increasing hedonism would lead to a future of “free love” in which everyone would be having sex with everyone else. Dystopian novels from We to Brave New World to Love in the Ruins all imagined something like this. But what really happened when we finally shed sexual inhibition? Pornhub, and with it the fact that people are having less sex now than anytime on record. The prudes of the 1950s were way more sexually active than the libertines of today.
I think I have proved my point. The axiom isn’t just a joke. But I have come to realize that it has a limited application: it is an observation of the downward spiral of all technocracies. A technocracy is not merely a society that is full of machines. It is a society that is a machine—or at least attempts to become one. Like democracy or oligarchy, technocracy is a form of power, a regime—a way of ordering mankind and the world that both posits and produces a future for both. This is the “future” that my friend and I have always found “worse.” But if contemporary discussions concerning the latest and greatest technology—AI—are anything to go by, we do not really understand why our future is always worse; why our technological progress and the promise of our inventions always seems to end in something lame and disappointing; why we are not happy wielding our new, immense, and impressive power. We do not understand technocracy, the form of power in which we all (at least partially) reside: I hope to shed light on this mystery.
The Humane
Despite the newness of any technology, it is still the product of human power—a thing made by men. We are the source of technological creativity, the ones who build machines and mechanisms. Here, I want to explore the idea of man as a machine-maker. I choose the potter and his pot as my example, not to oversimplify or ignore the complexities of the digital technologies that so concern us, but to bring into relief “technology” and “mechanism” as they appear in even the most pre-technological and non-mechanical arts.
When a potter crafts a pot, he sees into the nature of clay. He sees what it is and, in doing so, what it could be—in other words, he perceives the act and the potency of the clay. The potter sees the form of the pot in the nature of clay. This perception does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, knowing clay—its act and potency—requires knowing the world around the clay. In order to see what the clay could be, he has to see what other things are: potency is only activated by something already in act. For a pot to emerge out of the clay, the potter must do something to the clay with something already there, with water, his hands, the kiln. He must understand the form of these things and so their potency, and so everything that interacts with them. This means that in order for the potter to see the clay as a potential pot, he must have a vision and knowledge of a world, a complex and mysterious “whole” made up of things and their relations, a world in which pots appear possible and desirable—a world in which they belong.
This vision is not an extrinsic “looking in”; the potter’s knowledge is not merely “passive.” Clay, simply, does not have the power to become a pot apart from the knowledge and world of the potter. In other words, the potter’s vision of the world—a world in which pots are possible and desirable—is constitutive of the nature of clay. Without this knowledge, “clay” would not be clay as we know it: that is, clay with the power to become a pot. This creative, world-altering knowledge is an art (in Greek, a technê).
Pots have an “end”; they are made to be artifacts with purpose in the world. The potter who sees a potential pot in the clay cannot see this purpose in a vacuum, apart from other things. He only sees the clay “crying out” to be molded into a pot because he considers—in his own mode—-the “final end.” The art that brings together the clay, the water, the kiln, his hands is intrinsically bound up with the table the pot will sit on, the broth it will contain, the person who will dip his bread into it and who will smile at his friend sitting across from him. We can say then that, ultimately, the art of the potter concerns the purpose of the whole world. In this way, every pot ever made exceeds the art of pottery, considered on its own. The potter sees the pot in relation to the world: this “total” idea, the “exemplar,” is what the potter holds in his mind as he works on the clay. When the pot comes to be through his work, it comes as an addition to a world that was waiting for it, and in joining that world it makes the world more a place where pots belong and are useful.
The world of the arts is necessarily a social and shared world. The craftsman begins as a child who must learn the many arts that structure his family’s world. He must learn how to speak, what things are, why he is there, and what others are for. He is shaped—as clay by the potter—by the craftsmanship of his family: according to the art of family life, the art of education, the art of household management, the art of rule. All of these situate the child in a world of forms and ends. As the child internalizes and so becomes a master of the family arts, he becomes a person who belongs in the family; even more, the family becomes more the place where the child belongs. This process is one of con-corporation: the family is modified in the direction of the child as the child is modified in the direction of the family. This is what it means for the family to be his home; a world where he dwells as himself; a world that needs him in order to be complete, to be a whole.
As an apprentice, the child brings this world with him. He has to learn, simply, how clay is shaped into a pot, but even more how the pot is to be incorporated into his world, the world in which he and his family belong. An art is never in fact some generic skill. An art is a deep, abiding understanding of a person in his world—it is a habitus, a second nature. When the master instructs the apprentice (in such a way that the apprentice will one day become a master) his instruction must be personal, must be directed at this apprentice, this person. This is because mastery is nothing other than the integration of the art into the person himself and so the integration of the person into the world that includes the art—and a modification of the art, and so its world, in the direction of the person.
Education is a sort of “crossing” of exemplars, the ideas that are held in the mind for art. The master sees in the apprentice what he wants the apprentice to become, a true master of the art. He holds an exemplar in his mind that is really an image of himself in the mode of the apprentice. At the same time, the apprentice sees in the master a model to emulate and holds an exemplar of himself as an image of the master. In this way, the master knows himself, as a master of the art, directly and the apprentice, as a potential master, only indirectly. The apprentice knows himself directly and the master indirectly. As they work together, their exemplars begin to cross: both modify their idea in the direction of the other’s as the contours of that idea become visible.
The relationship between the master and the apprentice is a profound dynamic of authority and obedience, a sort of conversation which creates the shared space of the crossing of their parallel but non-identical ideas.[1] This is a relationship in which both persons are modified and so con-corporated. The shared world that emerges from this is a realization of neither the master’s nor the apprentice’s exemplars: their ideas included a supposition of the other person and his world, and such a supposition is always a mixture of the truth of the other and the truth of one’s self. This shared world is different from the ideas of both and yet recognizable by both. It is neither univocal nor equivocal, but analogical. As this shared space grows in completeness, their relationship grows into what the tradition calls “friendship.” When the apprentice masters the art, it has become an art shared between two masters, the possession of neither. One master recognizes the art of another even though it is not what he would have made; this recognition occurs precisely because the master recognizes the art of pottery as including intrinsically other masters, operating in a world they share and so a world that none of them exhaust. This is what it means, I think, for one to recognize the universal behind the particular, the idea that transcends one’s exemplars. It is precisely this transcendance of the universal that allows the master to educate the next apprentice, and the next, and the next—ever deepening but never exhausting the art.
Every art includes the other arts in so far as they bear upon the possibility and desirability of that art. The carpenter must have an idea of pottery because pots sit on tables of wood—because the person who dips his bread into the broth is sitting in a wooden chair. As a member of a family, the carpenter has learned the art of manners, an art that includes pots. He has learned the art of doing the dishes, of hospitality, of nursing a sick friend—more “pots.” The carpenter knows what pots are, though not as the potter knows. For the potter, the pot is the ground for understanding the table. For the carpenter, the table is the ground for understanding the pot. The carpenter can’t make a pot nor can he teach another how to do it, but he knows one when he sees it, because he knows what tables are and who he is as a carpenter in the world. The full battery of learned arts, the habitus, the second natures that constitute a man as the person he is in the world—all of these include within themselves all the other arts that constitute the total, shared world in which the artist dwells with other artists. To learn an art is not simply to specialize or narrow one’s focus upon some partial and limited number of tasks. Rather, it is to know the whole world in the mode of that art.
Ideas of things are not, therefore, stale, identical repetitions of ideal forms. When the craftsman forms his idea, he is himself included within it. The idea of the pot is, at the same time, an idea of the world and an idea of the potter at home in it. The pot is social in two very important senses. First, as I have already explained, the art of pottery is social; it has an end that integrates it into the wider social environment; the products of pottery are capable of being evaluated by others because the art of pottery is implicated in all the other arts. Secondly, the craftsman’s pot images himself, and so his community, into this shared world. When his pot modifies the world, it modifies it by moving it toward being a home for the pot, for the art, for the potter, for the carpenter, for their communities, even as it modifies all these identities and associations in the direction of the wider world. Art, therefore, bridges the gaps between things and persons—through the construction of a world that bears the image of persons. We share, therefore, a world of non-identical repetitions—images of persons in things, and things in universals—and this non-identity is the condition of possibility for the world’s dynamism.
The person dwells in the world as himself and yet the world is not contained within himself. The carpenter lives in a world that is shared with the potter. The potter recognizes the table and the carpenter recognizes the pot—and yet they are not the same to each. This shared world is an infinitely complex crossing of arts that contain within themselves all other arts. The world is essentially analogical: essentially present and yet from every person’s place, open. The carpenter knows what a pot is, but the potter could show him something he doesn’t know. This showing would not undermine his carpentry, but allow him to improve it, because his art is in the world of the other arts: his carpentry is for a world that includes pottery. The world is not simply his idea; it is an idea that is shared through the conversation within the arts and between the arts. Perhaps we can conceive of the world as simply the place where conversation is possible—the space where language works.
In short, art creates a humane world. Man as an artist is engaged in a project of elevating the raw material of reality into his world—building that world through building himself. The products of art are humane, integral to who we are. The matrix of potency and act, of the relational forms that form the world and so underwrite any craft, is itself the product of craft. To state it boldly: we live in a world that is an artifact.
This understanding might tempt us down any number of metaphysical dead-ends. We might end up “thrown” into Heidegger’s mysterious “clearings” where beings appear without warning, wherein we try to ground the world on itself and get lost in being’s circular flow. We might, like Derrida, get caught in our categories and words, in our self-referential arts which appear as inscription (law rather than conversation), so that meaning is always deferred until it vanishes into the groundless différance. Or we might, like Deleuze, try to ground the whole in desire and so find a world of endless frustration, of desires grounded on desires which are never satisfied. Each of these approaches attempts to describe the whole of the phenomenal world through one of its movements: identity, artifice, or desire; each attempts to articulate an effect greater than its cause, a whole grounded on a part. The world as social construction, then, becomes a tragedy.
If we want to save the world—which I think we should—we have to make a theological move: The raw material of reality is not that “raw.” St. Thomas, following Augustine and most of the Christian tradition, called reality a product of art, albeit a divine art. God fashions the world according to exemplars, ideas, each of which includes within itself every other idea—because each of them is God thinking himself in a different mode. The parts of reality are already a world, a whole, bound up together in a matrix of potency and act and directed toward a desirable end: communion with their divine source. Man is most like God because he is given intellect, a special participation in the divine mind. The tradition refers to the intellect as a light, an illumination, through which reality appears to man as already a world, albeit a wilderness; a world calling out for man to transform it; calling for his arts, his naming of the animals, his subduing and having dominion. Man does not move into this wilderness under his own steam, as it were. If he did, we would find ourselves back to Heidegger, Derrida, or Deleuze—trying to ground reality upon man. Rather, man in his nature is always already called into a wilderness that is integral and whole, into a world waiting to be humanized by a humanization that is both possible and desirable. As the apprentice is called by the master, so is man called by God.
Man’s creation of a world, therefore, is neither groundless, arbitrary, nor violent. The human arts that create the world are each an image of the divine art of creation in a different mode. This is the doctrine of the analogia entis, the analogy of being—the doctrine that saves metaphysics from the postmodernists. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 articulated it this way: “between creator and creature no similarity can be noted, however great, without an ever-greater difference being noted between them.”[2] Man’s ideas are finite (each being a thinking of himself). God’s are infinite (each being a thinking of Himself). Man’s ideas are images of the divine ideas; there is a real similarity between the two, but it is always offset by an ever-greater difference. Our arts, then, create a world that has no “backstop.” Everything we craft, everything that appears to us as this or that, has more behind it. Everything is a symbol: something that means something more. This “more” is the wilderness, the world of God’s art, not yet elevated into our own, but asking for it. We see it, we know it is there, not as something fixed, but as that which lies beyond and calls us to greater perfection, greater mastery. The wilderness is present to us as potential—a potential which is already in relation to the act of our world, that is, to our arts. Our arts already push, or perhaps pull, us into this realm of “more.” The potency that is integral to any act is greater than what that act has proper claim to, because every act is always a participation in the transcendent, is always more than it is and more than its resources can account for: potency outstrips act.
This allows for the creativity of the arts. The master potter, called by the divine, comes to perceive beyond all the pots that he has ever seen, into the darkness that lies beyond the pots, a seeing that renders the darkness penetrable—a wilderness and not an abyss. His art is a similarity to the divine art but, as such, it is also an intimation of that ever-greater difference that always exists wherever a similarity obtains between creature and creator. There is always another, better pot to make. This is why we refer to the master artist as being “inspired”: he creates something that has never been seen before and yet something that still belongs in the world, something that the world was calling for even though it did not know how to articulate it. The human world is looking for God, daring to move into the “ever-greater difference” as it is called into it. This truth is what renders our arts beautiful. Beauty is the inexplicable breaking through of the infinite into the finite[3] or, as we might say from the other direction, the seemingly preposterous extension of the arts of man into the art of God.
All craft, all technê, has its end in an artistry that is necessarily beautiful because all technê is always pointing beyond itself, always intimating more, and therefore always sublime. The development of the arts and the world they build is the construction of an ever-greater beauty. This is the essence and purpose of our rationality. It is not found in our sorting of the world into categories that we can then use in logical deductions. A computer does this. Rather, it is found in our undermining of mere categories with universals that always surpass our attempts at systemization: the “similarity” (categories) always calls forth the “ever-greater difference” (the transcendental) which gives space for our categories to be and to grow. This rhythm distinguishes the universals of reason from mere notions or opinions or variables of computation, and it is what distinguishes a techne from a knack. A philosopher is he who pursues the ever-greater difference, undermining every known “universal” in the pursuit of the true universal. The true craftsman is a philosopher of wood or stone or clay, undermining his art through its ever-greater perfection, refusing to allow it to “settle in” to a mechanical repetition. The true craftsman is the master of his art and so of the world that the art constructs, describes, and comprehends—his mastership is a dynamic rhythm between what has been done and what could be done, between the particular and the universal, the similarity and the difference.
Art, then, like philosophy, subsists in wonder and so in humility. Wonder flows out of our smallness in our greatness, out of the strangeness of being a little, finite, particular person who somehow participates in the universal. The insect is small, but it does not know that it is small. It is only small from the outside. Only something bigger than the bug knows that the bug is little. Man is different. Man is small on the inside. Man feels small. He looks up and sees what’s there: not as its equal, but from within his smallness. The tension between our limited, particular existence and our rationality—which knows the “ever-greater” universal—makes wonder possible. Our smallness is as integral to this experience as our greatness: wonder describes the very rhythm between the two. Wonder is the experience of our bold, even rash, turn toward the infinite by which we, who are always outstripped by the “ever-greater difference,” dare to claim “similarity” to God.
Here, then, is the relationship between philosophy and theology. It is not some sort of silly stacking of “grace” on top of “nature,” nor a merely methodological distinction concerning which data one uses in one’s reasoning. Philosophy begins in wonder, and wonder prepares us for theology, which frankly admits and thinks upon what philosophy intimates: that our every idea, our every work, is a participation in the infinite otherness of God who exceeds them. The smallness of philosophy is already a participation in the greatness of theology. Philosophy is a handmaiden, not in some servile conception, but in the Marian form—the servant who bears her own master into the world. The humility of the true philosopher and so of the true artist is an act of faith.
We can move into the difference only through the similarity—only through our categories. But if we are not to suppose that an effect can exceed its cause, this requires the condescension of that which is beyond down and into that which is present. The shallower world must be deepened with the resources available to it, a feat which is possible because those resources are open, through faith and the hope that accompanies it, to the greater difference. Mastership is always a form of worship and prayer. The master is led, as he himself leads the apprentice, through the crossing of his exemplars with those of the Master Himself. The master offers his ideas to God and God modifies them as he gives them back. God speaks back to the master in the idiom through which the master speaks to Him and yet God does not leave that idiom alone, but calls forth the potency that resides within it and which surpasses it, moving it deeper into the ever-greater difference. The master is always an apprentice, the father always a son, and his dutiful speaking and listening is what renders him truly a master, one who leads the humane world deeper into the true, the good, and the beautiful.
