Energy, work, growth, and the myth of progress

In Charles Frazier’s fabulous US Civil War novel, Cold Mountain, Ruby, a tough country woman who embodies the novel’s agrarian ideals, has some withering comments on human progress, after listening to her friend and farm owner, Ada, read the stories of Homer:

Not much had altered in the way of things, despite the passage of a great volume of time……as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not, the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained.

I was considering these words in the light of recent concerns about energy use and the advance of artificial intelligence into the areas of convenience, and in particular the recent pronouncement of the wealthiest and least wise occupant of Earth, Elon Musk, speaking to the less-wealthy-and-still-obscenely-rich-but-equally-unwise Rishi Sunak, that we would never have to work again:

I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here. We will have for the first time something smarter than the smartest human. It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is but there will come a point where no job is needed.

This is the height of hedonistic and even evolutionary stupidity. It ignores the creation mandate that in several world faiths has as its expression: settle, work the land productively, have families and find ways to worship the God who created you and the land. In Judaism and Christianity this is clear, because of the narrative structure of their faith, but it has only been half-heartedly followed. In animist cultures, the land and the spirit world and the human and animal world are all deeply interconnected, and working and farming the land is a way of honouring the deity that dwells there. Ruby’s perspective is not particularly Christian, but it is born of necessity and closeness to the soil, and is of course anathema to most people who think that somehow humanity is ‘evolving’ to some ‘higher state of being’ whilst ignoring the existing arrangements given us by our creator to become more like him, namely, repentance from our sins, healing of our relationships and hard-working discipleship to reflect the likeness of Jesus Christ.

Wendell Berry’s well-known 1987 essay ‘Why I am not going to buy a computer‘ lists a set of criteria by which we might judge whether there has been technological progress in terms of the community of users, and includes things like the new being cheaper than the old, being able to be repaired by someone of average intelligence with the correct tools, using less energy than the thing it replaces, and most usefully to us in our drive for convenience,

it should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and that includes family and community relationships.

This is a stance of wisdom that has sustained a number of communities in their relationship with technology: if we adopt this technology, what will it do for us that we cannot do already? And is that worth doing? And what will we lose? And how will this impact the culture that our relationships, families, faith perspectives and existing technologies have already built?

The key to this, of course, is the wise placing of limits on what we can and should do, something that AI people generally ignore, or at least pretend doesn’t matter. The technological determinism that lies behind our approach to technology – it’s there, so we ought to use it (air-fryers are the current must-have!) – means that we rarely stop and ask the questions that we ought. Regularly we hear the cry of some community or other (today it is French organic farmers) that ‘the world is going to fast for us’ as though speed was important. Speed, like everything, needs limits. We can improve things, but until we ask what was the good of what existed previously, we will not be able to measure that improvement. As Chesterton said, don’t take down a fence until you understand the reason it was erected.

Underlying Musk’s hubris and our own unwillingness to set limits, I believe, is the issue of energy. It is now undisputed by any serious researcher, climate scientist or meteorologist that our commitment to setting fire to carbon-bearing products in order to fuel things is having an alarming impact on our world and therefore on its politics and, particularly, on the poor, the 94% of people in the world who have less money than me. The cheaper energy is, the more we use it, regardless of its source. We seem to be committed to streamlining and to finding new ways of making things more efficient, but we are not considering non-use. We are not looking to do things by hand, with our own power, with our own strength, if we can find a machine to do it for us. This is precisely the attitude that begat slavery: I can’t be bothered to do this, let’s buy someone to do it, whether as servant or slave. So we say that we ‘grow crops’ but actually the labour of that is done by itinerant labour from the EU, or Mexico, or wherever. We ‘grow tomatoes’ but it is slave labour that is doing the growing, whether in Italian or Floridan fields. Amazon, as a company, runs on this principle: get rid of limits, speed things up, keep wages low, regard workers as robots.

Here is Wendell Berry on this subject, in 2013:

The long-term or permanent damage inflicted upon all life by the extraction, transportation, and use of fossil fuels is certainly one of the most urgent public issues of our time, and, of course, it must be addressed politically. But responsibility for the better economy, the better life, belongs to us individually and to our communities. The necessary changes cannot be made on the terms prescribed to us by the industrial economy and its so-called free market. They can be made only on the terms imposed upon us by the nature and the limits of local ecosystems. If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer.

Berry’s perspective on this is important because it is a reflexive one. We ourselves must endure change, not just economically, but internally and radically as we look to what we can produce for ourselves, how we can shorten supply chains (sometimes I stop and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to grow sheep on hillsides in South Island, and send them to the UK), how we can shop more locally, sustainably and ethically, and even, eat less and eat what can be grown near our towns. It will also mean a transfer from what he has called, in many essays, ‘the industrial mind’ or the ‘industrial standard’ to a way of looking at ourselves, our homes and gardens, our economies and our local areas in a completely different way:

If we are to continue to respect ourselves as human beings, we have got to…stop the fossil fuel economy. But…our success, if it happens, will change our world and our lives more radically than we can now imagine…To succeed we will have to give up the mechanical ways of thought that have dominated the world increasingly for the last 200 years, and we must begin now to make that change in ourselves. For the necessary political changes will be made only in response to changed people. We must understand that fossil fuel energy must be replaced, not just by “clean” energy, but also by less energy.