We live in an age of moral irresponsibility. By that, I do not just mean that humans perpetrate immoral, or amoral, acts and fully expect to get away with them (although they do). I mean that the blame for these things always seems to be split and dispersed, with too many culprits for anyone to actually be culpable.
Take orangutans. Indonesia
So everybody plays their little part, but who is the real protagonist? In Wickedness, in agreement with Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley tells us that,
‘the administrative complexity of the modern world makes such cases [Arendt was talking about the bureaucracy of the minor politicians in Nazi Germany] increasingly common. Bureaucracy tends to look like ‘the rule of nobody’, and this obscuring of individual responsibility is one thing which makes the concept of wickedness so hard to apply.’
Having seen the gut-wrenching documentary Green, about the last hours of a displaced orangutan’s life, I would not hesitate to call the annihilation of the rainforest evil. Now… where is my villain? In the technological, globalised era, the harder we look for somebody to blame, the more the picture dissipates. It’s like staring into the sun. And the division of responsibility has the effect of making us believe, rather than that everybody is to blame, that in fact, nobody is to blame…and certainly not little old me, just another cog in the machine.
In the slaughterhouse, the person who stuns the pig has not really killed it, they’ve just knocked it out. The person who slits its throat has not really killed it, because it arrived looking pretty much dead anyway. The person who begins to dismember the carcass it not really the killer, despite the fact that the stunner and the throat slitter sometimes make a hash of it and the animal is still alive as the dismemberment begins. Clearly, the owner of the slaughterhouse is not responsible; he has no blood on his hands. And when my husband eats his bacon sandwich, he is not responsible; he consumes it because it is dead already.
In Eating Animals Safran Foer describes the woman who first invented the battery cage. She had a lot of chickens so she piled the cages on top of each other. I think she was a housewife. She didn’t sound evil, but then the person who took the idea to the next level probably wasn’t evil either, and neither was the person who thought about taking it to the next, next level, and so on. Technology happens in incremental stages, with one piece being built upon the foundations of the last, and so on, and so forth, until things are finally taken to their logical conclusion and we have farms in Japan
In a lecture on the Philosophy of Technology Andrew Feenberg traces our obsession with technological advancement back to the Greeks, who were fascinated by techne; that which had to be created by somebody (i.e. the opposite of nature, which creates itself). They also believed that everything, natural or techne, contained an essence, and they were equally interested in what the essence, or spirit, of a thing was. What it meant. In modern society we continue to be obsessed with technology, but we are no longer interested in essence. We create machines that perform acts of war and violence on our behalf, but we do not concern ourselves with the essence of the thing, only how efficiently it does its job.
‘In the modern context technology does not realize objective essences inscribed in the nature of the universe, as does techne. It now appears as purely instrumental, as value free…Technology in this scheme of things encounters nature as raw materials, not as a world that emerges out of itself, a physis, but rather as stuff awaiting transformation into whatever we desire. The world is understood mechanistically, not teleologically. It is there to be controlled and used without any inner purpose.’
In other words, nature, once the polar opposite of techne, has become technology too. Non-human animals, and even humans, are included in this attitude, and like machines, biological bodies are now viewed as the sum of their parts; their value measured in terms of their usefulness alone. This brings us back to Midgley’s Wickedness, in which she argues that although machines [technology] are thought of as a means to an end, in reality we often treat them as ends in themselves. Here she cites Eric Fromm, who in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, shows how literature has celebrated machines, gradually leading in particular towards the glorification of death.
The glorification of death? Yes, I would suppose that when you have been trained to kill by playing video games (see Jonathan Taylor’s The Emerging Geographies of Virtual Worlds), and hooyaa marine, you simply have to press a button, and multiple strangers have the life blown out of their bodies like dust, then, without having to look into their eyes, or see the gore, and the messiness of it, killing becomes bombastic, colourful, electrifying. We are amazed, and horrified, but mostly enthralled with what technology can do, and the gods that it makes out of us mere mortals. We must use it because we can. It demands of us that we do, and with the technicolour hyper-world that it creates, it distracts us from another option.
In last week’s post I referred to industry being the motif of the wicked, the precursor to our downfall. That’s how the fantasy world sees it, anyhow. But the fact is, we cannot go backwards, so we march on forwards. Feenberg believes that there is still the promise of greater freedom in technology, that the problem is not with technology itself, but with our failure to devise a more democratic process of developing and delivering it. He believes that technology is still controllable, but that we cannot afford to forget that it is also value-laden. I would add that we cannot afford to forget about our own personal autonomy, and that of other creatures; we are not just cogs in the machine.
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