What Technology Wants (34 page)

I asked Leon whether all the goodness of the Amish life—all that comforting mutual aid, satisfying hands-on work, reliable community infrastructure—could still issue forth if, say, all kids attended school up to 10th grade instead of eighth, as they now do? Just for starters. Well, you know, he said, “hormones kick in around the ninth grade, and boys, and even some girls, just don't want to sit at desks and do paperwork. They need to use their hands as well as their heads, and they ache to be useful. Kids learn more doing real things at that age.” Fair enough. When I was a teen I wished I had been “doing real stuff” instead of being holed up in a stuffy high-school classroom.

The Amish are a little sensitive about this, but their self-reliant lifestyle as it is currently practiced is heavily dependent on the greater technium that surrounds their enclaves. They do not mine the metal they build their mowers from. They do not drill or process the kerosene they use. They don't manufacture the solar panels on their roofs. They don't grow or weave the cotton in their clothes. They don't educate or train their own doctors. They also famously do not enroll in armed forces of any kind. (But in compensation for that, the Amish are world-class volunteers in the outside world. Few people volunteer more often, or with more expertise and passion, than the Amish/Mennonites. They travel by bus or boat to distant lands to build homes and schools for the needy.) If the Amish had to generate all their own energy, grow all their clothing fibers, mine all metal, harvest and mill all lumber, they would not be Amish at all because they would be running large machines, dangerous factories, and other types of industry that would not sit well in their backyards (one of the criteria they use to decide whether a craft is appropriate for them). But without someone manufacturing this stuff, they could not maintain their lifestyle or prosperity. In short, the Amish depend on the outside world for the way they currently live. Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice—but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it.

For a long time I had been perplexed as to why Amish-like dissenters were primarily found only in North America. (The related Mennonites have a few satellite settlements in South America.) I looked long and hard to find Japanese “Amish,” Chinese Amish, Indian Amish, even Islamic Amish but discovered none. I found some ultraorthodox Jews in Israel who reject computers, and likewise one or two small Islamic sects that prohibit TV and internet and some Jain monks in India who refuse to ride in automobiles or trains. As far as I can tell, there are no other ongoing large-scale communities based outside North America that have built a lifestyle around minimal technology. That's because outside technological America the idea seems crazy. This opt-out option makes sense only when there is something to opt out of. The original Amish protesters (or Protestants) were indistinguishable from neighboring European peasants. Fiercely persecuted by the state church, the Amish maintained their separation from the “worldly” mainstream by not upgrading their technology. No longer persecuted, the Amish today are a counterpoint to the incredibly technological aspect of American society. Their alternative thrives in opposition to the unrelenting thrust of individual personal reinvention and progress that is the hallmark of America. The Amish lifestyle is too familiar to poor peasants in China or India to have any meaning there. Such elegant rejection can only exist in, and because of, a modern technium.

The overabundance of the technium in North America has sprouted other dropouts as well. In the late 1960s and early 1970s tens of thousands of self-described hippies stampeded to small farms and makeshift communes to live simply, not too differently from the Amish. I was part of that movement. Wendell Berry was one of the clear-thinking gurus we listened to. In small experiments in rural America, we jettisoned the technology of the modern world (because it seemed to crush individualism) and tried to rebuild a new world while digging wells by hand, grinding our own flour, keeping bees, erecting homes from sun-dried clay, and even getting windmills and water generators to occasionally work. Some found religion, too. Our discoveries paralleled what the Amish knew—that this simplicity worked best in community, that the solution wasn't no technology but some technology, and that what seem to work best were the low-tech solutions we called “appropriate technology.” This tie-dyed, deliberate, conscious engagement with appropriate technology was deeply satisfying for a while.

But only for a while. The
Whole Earth Catalog,
which I edited at one point, was the field manual for those millions of simple technology experiments. We ran pages and pages of information on how to build chicken coops, grow your own veggies, curdle your own cheese, school your children, and start a home business in a house made from bales of straw. And so I got to witness close up how the early enthusiasm for restricted technology would inevitably give way to unease and restlessness. Slowly the hippies drifted away from their deliberately low-tech world. One by one they left their domes for suburban garages and lofts where, much to our collective astonishment, many of them transformed their small-is-beautiful skills into small-is-start-up entrepreneurship. The origins of the
Wired
generation and the long-hair computer culture (think open-source UNIX) lay in the counterculture dropouts of the 70s. As Stewart Brand, hippie founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog,
remembers, “‘Do your own thing' easily translated into ‘Start your own business.'” I've lost count of the hundreds of individuals I personally know who left communes to eventually start high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It's almost a cliche by now—barefoot to billionaire, just like Steve Jobs.

The hippies of the previous generation did not remain in their Amish-like mode because as satisfying and attractive as the work in those communities was, the siren call of choices was more attractive. The hippies left the farm for the same reason the young have always left: The possibilities leveraged by technology beckon all night and day. In retrospect we might say the hippies left for the same reason Thoreau left his Walden; they both came and left to experience life to its fullest. Voluntary simplicity is a possibility, an option, a choice that one should experience for at least part of one's life. I highly recommend elective poverty and minimalism as a fantastic education, not least because it will help you sort out your technology priorities. But I have observed that simplicity's fullest potential requires that one consider minimalism one phase of many (even if a recurring phase, as is meditation or the Sabbath). In the past decade, a new generation of minimites has arisen, and they are now urban homesteading—living lightly in cities, supported by ad hoc communities of like-minded homesteaders. They are trying to have both—the Amish satisfaction of intense mutual aid and hand labor and the ever-cascading choices of a city.

Because of my own personal journey from low tech to high choice, I admire Leon and Berry and Brende and the Old Order Plain Folk communities. I am convinced that the Amish and minimites are more content and satisfied as people than the rest of us fast-forward urban technophiles. In their deliberate constraint of technology they have figured out how to optimize an alluring combination of leisure, comfort, and certainty over the optimization of uncertain possibilities. The honest truth is that as the technium explodes with new self-made options, we find it harder to find fulfillment. How can we be fulfilled when we don't know what is being filled?

So why not steer everyone in this direction? Why don't we all give up more choices and become Amish? After all, Wendell Berry and the Amish see our multimillion choices as illusory and meaningless, or as choices that are really entrapments.

I believe these two different routes for technological lifestyle—either optimizing contentment or optimizing choices—come down to very different ideas of what humans are to be.

It is only possible to optimize human satisfaction if you believe human nature is fixed. Needs cannot be maximally satisfied if they are in flux. Minimal technologists maintain that human nature is unchanging. If they refer to evolution at all, they claim that millions of years surviving on the savannah shaped our social natures in such a way they are not easily satiated with new gizmos. Instead, our enduring souls crave timeless goods.

If the nature of humans is indeed invariant, then it is possible to achieve a peak technological solution to support it. For example, Wendell Berry believes that a solid cast-iron hand pump is far superior to hauling water in buckets on a yoke. And he says that domesticated horses are better than pulling a plow yourself, as many an ancient farmer before him has done. But for Berry, who uses horses to drive his farm gear, anything beyond the innovation of hand pump and horsepower works against the satisfaction of human nature and natural systems. When tractors were introduced in the 1940s, “the speed of work could be increased, but not the quality.” He writes:

For Berry, technology peaked in 1940, about the moment when all these farm implements were as good as they could get. In his eyes, and in those of the Amish, too, the elaborate circular solution of a small, mixed family farm, where the farmer produces plant feed for the animals, who produce manure (power and food to grow more plants), is the perfect pattern for the health and satisfaction of a human being, human society, and the environment. After thousands of years of tinkering, humans found a way to optimize human work and leisure. But now found, additional choices overshoot this peak and only make things worse.

I could be wrong, of course, but it seems pure foolishness, if not the height of conceit and hubris, to believe that in the long course of human history, and by that I mean the next 10,000 years in addition to the past 10,000 years, the peak of human invention and satisfaction should turn out to be 1940. It is no coincidence that this date also happens to be the time when Wendell Berry was a young boy growing up on a farm with horses. Berry seems to follow Alan Kay's definition of technology. Kay, a brilliant polymath who has worked at Atari, Xerox, Apple, and Disney, came up with as good a definition of technology as I've heard: “Technology,” Kay says, “is anything that was invented after you were born.” The year 1940 cannot be the end of technological perfection for human fulfillment simply because human nature is not at its end.

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago. The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood-fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature—of an ancient agrarian epoch. But this devotion to a traditional way of being ignores the way in which our nature—our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations—is being recast by ourselves and by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures. We need new jobs in part because we are new people at our core.

We are different physical beings from our ancestors. We think differently. Our educated and literate brains work differently. More than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we are shaped by the accumulating wisdom, practices, traditions, and culture of all those who've lived before us and live with us. We are cramming our lives with ubiquitous messages, science, pervasive entertainment, travel, surplus food, abundant nutrition, and new possibilities every day. At the same time, our genes are racing to keep up with culture. And we are speeding the acceleration of those genes by several means, including medical interventions such as gene therapy. In fact, every trend of the technium—especially its increasing evolvability—points to a much more rapid change of human nature in the future.

Curiously, many of the same traditionalists who deny we are changing insist that we had better not.

I wish I had been an Amish boy in high school, making things, far from a classroom, sure of who I was. But reading books in high school opened up my mind to possibilities I had never imagined in grade school. My world began expanding in those years and has never stopped. Chief among those expanding possibilities were new ways to be human. Writing in 1950, sociologist David Riesman observed: “The more advanced the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else.” We expand technology to find out who we are and who we can be.

I know the Amish and Wendell Berry and Eric Brende and the minimites well enough to know that they believe we don't need exploding technology to expand ourselves. They are, after all, minimalists. The Amish find incredible contentment in their enactment of a fixed human nature. This deep human fulfillment is real, visceral, renewable, and so attractive that Amish numbers are doubling every generation. But I believe the Amish and minimites have traded contentment for revelation. They have not discovered, and cannot discover, who they can become.