Man is Not a Machine

The Global Spiral has an excerpt from John Lukacs’ latest book, Last Rites . An excerpt of an excerpt:

It is arguable that the two greatest intellectual achievements of the now ended age of five hundred years have been the invention (invention, rather than discovery) of the scientific method, and the development of historical thinking. Towering, of course, above the recognition of the latter stood and stands the recognition of the importance of “science,” because of the fantastic and still increasing variety of its practical applications. Yet there is ample reason to recognize evidences of an increasing duality in our reactions to its ever more astonishing successful and successive applications.

At first (or even second) sight the rapid increase of the variety of the technical applications of “science” are stunning. Most of these have gone beyond even the vividest imaginations of our forebears. That they are beneficial in many fields, perhaps foremost in applications of medicine and techniques of surgery, leaves little room for doubt. That most people, including youngsters, are eager to acquire and to use the ever more complicated gadgets and machines available to them cannot be doubted either. Consider here how the natural (natural here means instinctive but not insightful) ability in dealing with pushbutton mechanical devices is normal for young, sometimes even very young, people who do not at all mind comparing or even imagining themselves as akin to those machines, unaware as they are of the complexity and the uniqueness of human nature.

At the same time consider how the reactions of people to the ever more and more complicated machines in their lives are increasingly passive. Few of them know how their machines are built and how they actually function. (Even fewer of them are capable of repairing them.) Inspired by them they are not. (Compare, for example, the popular enthusiasm that followed Lindbergh’s first flight across the Atlantic in 1927 with the much weaker excitement that followed the astronauts’ first flight to the moon and back forty-two years later.) Machines may make people’s physical lives easier, but they do not make their thinking easier. I am not writing about happiness or unhappiness but about thinking. It is because of thinking, because of the inevitable mental intrusion into the structure and sequence of events, that the entire scheme of mechanical causality is insufficient. Still every one of our machines is wholly, entirely, dependent on mechanical causality. Yes, we employ our minds when—meaning: before, during, and after—we use them: but their functioning is entirely dependent on the very same causes producing the very same effects. It is because of their mechanical causality that computers are more than two hundred and fifty years old, indeed, outdated. In 1749 a French rationalist, De la Mettrie, wrote a famous book: Man a Machine . That was a new proposition then (though perhaps even then not much more than one of those Ideas Whose Time Has Come): dismiss soul or spirit; man may be a very complicated, perhaps the most complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless. Two hundred and fifty years later there is something dull and antiquated in such a picture: a dusty and mouldy model of human nature. Hence, below the surface: our present passive (and sometimes sickish and unenthusiastic) dependence on and acceptance of many machines.