Deus in machina
Christopher Booker
T. he hoardings of Britain are presently bearing.an unusually eye-catching poster. Over a picture of a Fiat car, it proclaims in large letters the legend 'DESIGNED BY COMPUTER. SILENCED BY LASER. BUILT BY ROBOT'. There seems to be something particularly provocative about this message. Clearly in the eyes of many people it cries out for what the TV credits describe as `additional material', and already in my own area of North London two of the posters carry such embellishments, one now reading 'DRIVEN BY IDIOTS', the other 'DRIVEN BY ZOMBIES'. N. ot the least offensive aspect of the advert.Isement is presumably its highly dubious, Implied proposition that the less human beings have to do with building a motor car, the more the process is taken over by machines, the more efficient, reliable and altogether desirable the end-product will be. Puman beings, the equation runs, equal Y; machines equal logical, impersonal perfection (to anyone, such as myself, actually owns a Fiat car, the absurdity of such a thesis can only provoke howls of more than usually disbelieving laughter). All this has led me once again to reflect on. the remarkable ambivalence of our attitude to machines. On the one hand, we are told, machines are wonderful, liberating commodities. Whether they are motor cars or telephones, washing machines orjet airliners machines make our lives easier. they bring us all closer together, they open UP our enjoyment of the world in an entirely new way. Essentially machines are our servants' They merely extend our natural faculties to an almost miraculous degree — and looked at from this point of view it is not surprising that one of the great Romantic fantasy her of our civilisation should be someone like James Bond, whose Mechanical 'extensions' — guns, cars and !Miler special gadgets — turn him into a suPerman'. On the other hand, as we all know, there is another quite different view of the part maChines play in our culture. Far from being the Great Liberators. machines have In fact enslaved and diminished modern man. They are not so much our servants as our masters. When the telephone rings, we Must forget our direct human contact with Whomever we happen to be with, and rush tn. answer it. Unless we have the all-seeing discrimination of a Richard Ingrams, we may sit stupefied for hours in front of our television sets, almost regardless of the nature •of the images flickering across Its shcreen. The processes of the assembly line ave become almost synonymous in our C,ulthre with mind-blowing, soul-destroymg urtidgerY. And of course it is no accident that the machine as Tyrant is a theme which has run consistently through many of the books and films of the twentieth century, all the way from Fritz Lang's nightmare Metropolis or Chaplin's Modern Times, to such recent and even more depressing satires as Jacques Tati's Traffic and Playtime. Nevertheless, even though this 'dark underside' of our relationship with machines is so familiar. I believe that the full subtlety of the extent to which machines have come to dominate our culture, our modes of thought and our inmost view of ourselves, has eluded even the nightmare stereotypes of the film-makers. In fact I believe that the unconscious psychological impact of machines on us all is so much greater than any of us can even begin really to be aware of, that it must constitute the single most significant new psychic influence to have entered the life of humanity since the dawn of religion. I suppose that it is only in the past two hundred years that machines have begun to exercise a truly major influence on the psyche of Western man. From the very beginnings of the industrial revolution, the new steam engines, pumps and looms admirably demonstrated the ambivalence of that influence — on the one hand being seen as glamorous symbols of man's unprecedented new power and wealth, on the other acting as the means whereby millions were consigned to living death in an entirely new version of hell on earth. Around 1900 a host of new inventions — the car. aeroplane. cinema, wireless — served as the germs of that new extension of the place of machinery in our lives which has borne such astonishing fruit in the mass car-ownershiP, television-watching, frozen-food consumption and so forth of the past thirty years. We have in effect, in the space of a few decades, called into being one vast World Machine, cocooning us from nature, and upon whose metal and electronic udders we have become dependent for food, clothing, heat, shelter and almost every necessity of life. Now the interesting thing, in terms of the way machines supposedly extendour natural faculties, is to observe precisely which faculties they represent. They express or embody only the male side of the human psyche — the function associated with our physical power. and the rational, organising function. In terms of human wholeness, each of these functions needs its balancing opposite from the female side of the e psyche before it can become truly lifgiying. The physical power principle requires the balance of feminine protective and sympathetic feeling, or it remains merely the exercise of egocentric brute force. The organising principle of the mind requires feminine intuition, that which gives a sense of the true 'hidden' connections between things, or it remains merely an exercise in rootless, arid, mechanical pattern-making. The female functions are those which are necessary to connect and to root the essentially divisive male functions in the earth.
If we look at the development of our civilisation over the past two centuries, what do we see? Of course, precisely as psychologically might have been predicted. our over-blown capacity to exercise physical power has turned increasingly against nature, against theroots of our being. We have used our hypertrophied, rootless, egocentric power in the only way we could have used it — to ransack and pillage nature, to produce an ever greater waste of actual and potential destruction. Similarly the colossal expansion of the rational, mechanical element in our lives has so reduced the world to a neat, dead mechanical order that it sometimes seems as if our whole existence is made up of numbers. lists and straight lines — statistics, percentages, money, postcodes, 24-hour clocks, barbed-wire fences.
For of course the real point is that our overdevelopment of the male functions of the psyche has increasingly left us in a state of almost complete psychic disintegration. Each of the essential functions now flaps about in our lives and in our culture without the balance that could give it root and meaning. Our rationality has surrounded us with a meaningless labyrinth of bureaucracy, jargon, acronyms, the dead mechanical patterns of our architecture. Our physical function is now so under-used (because it has been replaced by machines) that we over-compensate by our obsession with physical fitness and appearance, our grotesque over-valuation of sport and sporting heroes. Our lost feeling function surfaces in all that hideous display of what Robert Frost once called the 'collectivistic, regimenting love with which the modern world is being swept' (about as far from true sympathetic or compassionate feeling as could be imagined). The machine and its place in our lives.has in fact become the greatest single enemy to everything that was meant by the ancient goal of wholeness. It is, by definition, an enemy to nature. It is an enemy to that aspect of our potential wholeness which tells us that we are part of nature, and thus part of some transcendent whole. It is an enemy to human maturity, preventing any of us from achieving that state of wholeness which is of the essence of true maturity. Reduced to dependence on the World Machine we are all kept in a state of rebelliously dependent infantility.
Finally, it is an extraordinary thought that this World Machine we have created is almost wholly dependent on our new surrogate 'lifeblood', oil. If the oil runs out (despite all our wishful thinking about 'alternative energy sources') the Machine Stops. Yet up to 80 years ago we were scarcely aware the stuff existed. Civilisation didn't do too badly up to that point. It produced Beethoven, Mozart, Rembrandt, Dante, Chartres Cathedral. And what have we to show for our dependence since? Little more than an ugly, noisy, soulless wilderness, and the threat of our total destruction. It is a curious trick to have played on ourselves.
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