The American modernist poet E. E. Cummings ended up as a somewhat lonely, politically conservative Unitarian. It happens. He wrote some glittering verses glorying in the natural world and its colored wonders, and would jot down religious thoughts here and there. “May i be i is the only prayer,” he once noted.
This is perhaps a modern desire, one tied to many a young heart. I prayed it as a teenager. But I soon lost interest in the quest for my “I,” which quickly turned into a cold and dreary march down a factory assembly line, with a mute and numbed device on view at the end rather than the incomparable and shimmering self I hoped for. God, I discovered instead, is far more fascinating, alive, beautiful—everything.
Man the Machine (1747) is the slim masterpiece by the French doctor and intellectual Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Rapidly translated and disseminated throughout Europe, it can still be found on college reading lists. The volume captures the essence of what has become an influential modern framework for understanding who we are, perhaps the dominant one. At the time, it was an intervention in a great religious debate over the right relation between nature and revelation. But, as we know, La Mettrie’s position finally swept the field: all nature, no revelation. He allows not even a “ghost” lurking inside the metal plates. Whatever the “soul” is, he argued, it can be exhaustively analyzed according to physical, and hence biological, phenomena. Individual brains (whose “fibers” are “played” like violin strings, as he delightfully put it), cognitive combinatory facility, internal chemistry, the neural origins of sexual arousal, drugs like opium—add them all up and you get human consciousness and spirit. Food, he remarked with good, if limiting, Gallic gusto, marks the epitome of the soul’s physio-cultural makeup: “What power there is in a meal! Joy revives in a sad heart, and infects the souls of comrades, who express their delight in the friendly songs in which the Frenchman excels. The melancholy man alone is dejected, and the studious man is equally out of place [in such company].”
Many express horror over the Enlightenment hubris expressed in this reductionism. But La Mettrie’s materialist metaphysics held—and still hold—a deep attraction for those seeking to help others. For if we are machines, we can manipulate the gears of human personhood through education, social rejigging, and cultural change. Machines can be tinkered with, even rebuilt. With an almost bubbly optimism—his hedonistic philosophy drew scowls from the more earnest philosophes of his generation—La Mettrie opened up a vista that was to inspire the full gamut of contemporary mechanistic models of self-improvement, elaborated in biological science, psychology, genetics, and now cybernetics.
Religion has rebelled against this reductionism in the name of humanism and dignity. Properly so in some respects, but not in all. Horrible though it may seem, I have not only learned from Man the Machine, but actually accept the mechanisms of La Mettrie’s vision, at least in their organic and cultural modes. Years of observing (and struggling with) mental illness; long ministering within vineyards sorted by the mostly predictable forces of education, locale, family structure, social and commercial environments; picking my way through the thickets of attendant medical pressures; reading through the choreographed swill of cultural and academic logics displayed on screens and in journals and books, sinking in the quicksand of artistic “Simon says”: all of these experiences have confirmed the often deterministic constraints that hem us in. People may not always say what you expect, or behave as you might anticipate based on that conglomeration of social and physical factors that make them up, but they mostly do. Machines, no, perhaps, but certainly machine-like.
I would, if anything, press these mechanical determinations further than La Mettrie’s still streamlined outlook, charting them to the most inaccessible corners of our beings. The determinism thus amplified and drawn out, I would question the mechanists’ hope that understanding our mechanics can reveal to us the means for controlling and reordering them toward the “good.” Revamped education, imaginative urban planning, legislated healthy eating habits, socially orchestrated desire-fulfillment, eugenics, euthanasia: these are will-o’-the-wisps of wished-for well-being. The machine may be real. But it is too complex, its gears too numerous, intricate, and hidden. I see the hopeless labyrinths in myself: my cascading incapacities, rote performances and dead ends, multiplied, embarrassing, publicly visible. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). I neither know myself, nor how to find myself. The “I” whom I may have once so fervently, if briefly, desired to discover turns out to be one long process of impersonal function that cannot be charted. After all, my reason does the charting, and it, too, is implicated in the vast web of determining forces.
The Christian, however, need not fear La Mettrie and his tribe, though our language may differ. Instead of the “machine,” the Scriptures speak of “slavery”—slavery to sin, even slavery to righteousness (see Isa. 50:1; Rom. 6:18). The issue isn’t knowing how to grease the gears, as La Mettrie suggested. We are not searching for a better machine, a better engineer, the knowledge needed to pick out a more effective tool in our kit that sits awaiting its well-instructed use. We yearn, rather, to be freed from ourselves altogether, and to be given over to the One whose ordering power is itself all grace. We seek an “I,” perhaps; but one found in the offering, blessedly, of Someone Else.
Not that Christians have always understood the difference between machines and creatures. Talk abounds about tapping into our better nature, plugging into the spirit within us, re-energizing the repressed grandeur of our true selves. “Enlightened government,” as it developed in the eighteenth century, with its combination of naive and often brutally uncontrolled coercions, was as much the invention of misguided Christians as it was the program of La Mettrie’s atheism. “Getting it right” could never be an option.
The Christian’s answer to the machine is not a new and improved model. Our response must be machinelessness itself, an opening to the unmanipulable person of God, received rather than forced or engineered. God enters into our tool-bereftness rather than being seized with the busy instruments of our construction projects. He “came into” the world: “Lo, I come!” (Ps. 40:7; cf. Heb. 10:7). “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12).
We should call this “freedom,” as St. Paul does. Yet it is a strange freedom discovered in our defenselessness before the Lord’s gifts. The Church calls this act of reception “eucharist” or “thanksgiving.” From a human perspective, receiving the gift of God’s presence is the only alternative to the machine to which we are otherwise necessarily bound; his household is the one place where the slave is most assuredly free. Here I can see, not myself—I am “hidden” in God’s hand—but Another face to face, the One who renders me into his own form (see 1 John 3:2). Before this gift, we can only open our mouths in thanks: “Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness” (Ps. 30:4); “O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever” (Ps. 107:1). The book of Psalms, filled with dozens of these confessions of gratitude, is the preeminent book of thanks. Reciting its verse is the great antidote to the machine’s obduracy and impenetrability. The Psalter sweeps clean our shop floors and puts away our failed tools of self-management and self-improvement.
“Alas!” La Mettrie might well have exclaimed. “Thanksgiving accomplishes nothing. It cannot be transformed into a social program, an educational policy, or an economic system.” Just as well. Tinkering with the human mechanism brought us the industrial factory of the twentieth century’s competing, cruel, and crushing models of the social good. Machines wear down and fall apart. They are tossed aside and replaced. Cummings himself wrote, during the Second World War, “listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.”
But where else shall we go (see John 6:68)? I am better off here where God has placed me: “I,” whoever I am. The Frenchman’s meals may be happy enough. But without a grace said at their start and at their end, they are but the well-oiled pistons of empty bonhomie. Another prayer: May our culture, in its homes, its schools and universities, its stores and public squares, teach us thanks. It’s not my only prayer, but it’s a good one for our age.
Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College.
Image by Zdzislaw Beksinski, licensed via Creative Commons. Filter added, image cropped.
