Aah, the Machinations of Life

Life has been, and always will be, hard, but it is still meaningful, and beautiful

(Last weekend I spoke at the Doomer Optimism conference, Another Life is Possible, at the Woodcrest Bruderhof community in Rifton, NY. Below is the talk I didn’t give, and then the talk I did, as well as thoughts a week removed.

The theme was “exploring the far-reaching effects of technology … and the search for meaning in a world increasingly defined by machines.” More on the Bruderhof, and who they are, further below.)

When I first moved to Brooklyn Heights it wasn’t yet the exemplary well-to-do NYC neighborhood it is now, it was only a few decades beyond its nadir, with a shabby gentility that made it attractive to people like me, with more ambition than money, to purchase an apartment to raise a family in.

The co-op my family chose wasn’t yet uniformly professionals, wasn’t only bankers, lawyers, and academics. On each floor there was at least one, or two, residents, mostly elderly single women, who’d been there since the “bad old days,” such as Rose, across my hall, in her early 90s, who had raised a family in the two bedroom, but was now alone, except for a part-time Jamaican nurse to manage her decline into dementia. A knock on my door meant that it was either Rose coming to tell me, “There is a Negro woman in my apartment, trying to steal my things, can you come remove her?” or the nurse coming to sit in peace for a few minutes, and complain about that “nasty racist woman.” Rose was certainly open to the accusation of racism, even before dementia took her mind away, although her judgements, always told with effervescence, weren’t confined to blacks, and weren’t singularly negative, since she would cheerfully tell you the shortcomings, and advantages, of every ethnic group, including her own Southern Italians, but in language offensive to all but 19th-century anthropologists.

Then there was Lee, of a similar age, who lived on the second floor with her three scruffy dogs, which she walked constantly, the dogs pulling her through Brooklyn Heights as she made her rounds, picking through trash bins, to collect treasures she brought back. She became a source of concern for the building, as her mind slipped further away, walking through the neighborhood to construct piles in her small apartment, with a tendency to leave her stove on, a problem I thought about often at 3 am, given that we shared an internal air shaft four floors removed.

Lee’s end wasn’t dignified, although she did her best to maintain grace. Social services were eventually called in, her stove disconnected and food deliveries set up, and then her dogs began to perish, before the last one was removed, and she was placed in a nursing home. She died a few months later, and when I went to her funeral, attended by a disconcertingly small number, there was a reproduction of a striking portrait of a beautiful young woman, which was Lee at nineteen. A painting, which they said, now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

By then I was no longer surprised that the bag-lady in my building used to be glamorous, because as I had learned something of her past, gleaned from gossip, but never told with certainty, that she had been a successful artist, a cellist, married to a pianist, and had a vibrant social life, before a decline that began a decade before I moved in.

I also knew, from my brief interactions with her, that she was no normal bag-lady. One morning, while I was heading out of the building through the back narrow corridor, pushing a stroller with two toddlers, while holding a third and two bags of garbage, she came bursting in, headed the other way, pulled by her three dogs, her arms full of discoveries, her bra outside her dress, and we became entangled. After a minute of awkwardness, when finally past each other, she turned to me and said, in her usual cheery way, “Aaah, the machinations of life!”

That moment, insignificant, was close to thirty years ago, and yet it’s one that I find myself thinking about often, muttering, “Aaah, the machinations of life” whenever I’m logistically challenged, or in an equally absurd situation of my own making. Such as two weeks ago, when I was half-way through my daily walk, carrying a backpack stuffed with books in extreme heat, to “train my body” and invest it with a sense of heroism, and I became the target for a cloud of deer-flies, so thick, so persistent to use my blood as an incubator, that I had to start running, swatting wildly at my head with my big floppy hat, hitting myself so firmly that I set my ears ringing until the next day.

When I finally made it to a spot where I could rest, bug free, where the road curves sharply at the foot of two steep hills, I took off my pack, and sat there on the edge of the lonely road, clothes drenched, laughing at myself, my body overheated, tears running down my cheeks, when a FedEx truck came barrelling down far too fast for the curve, and my eyes and the driver’s locked onto each other, him leaning against the centripetal force, his body almost falling out of the angled truck, as if he alone was going to keep it from tipping over, and we smiled at each other, a brief friendly glance, and as he rumbled up the hill, all wheels now firmly on the ground, he stuck a hand out, gave me a thumbs up, and once again, I said out loud to nobody, “Aaaah, the machinations of life.”

The absurd things we do to ourselves, to endow our lives with a sense of purpose, or we believe we have to do because we are trying to make it in an indecipherable world, trying to make sense of what it means to be alive, and to be fulfilled. Me in the hallway, an eager thirty-year-old banker, headlong into building a career and a family, something I did without much consideration, because that is what you do, and Lee convinced by some urge she had, born from a desire that only she could understand, that she needed to find every discarded treasure in Brooklyn Heights and bring it back to her apartment. (I’d thought of dropping off the more appealing discarded items from my apartment on her doormat, but then I realized she would get more satisfaction finding them out in the trash. Easter eggs need to be discovered, not handed over.)

Then me, almost thirty years later, banking career completed, trying to find fulfillment through extreme walks, which while not as inscrutable as Lee’s quest, isn’t that different, and the FedEx delivery guy, literally hurling headlong, barrelling towards his own rewarding career.

That people are always reaching for a higher purpose, the way a beaver builds a dam, is the foundation of my optimism. We are industrious, inquisitive, and always aiming for the Good. Dams are not enough for us, we must also know why we are here, and what it all means, so we construct elaborate theories, harness and unleash titanic amounts of energy, invent complex machines, all attempting to achieve complete knowledge.

Yet for all my optimism, I am also a skeptic, in that I have a fundamental humility, because I believe there are some questions no amount of additional computing time, no amount of additional variables in your model, no amount of additional data centers, can solve. We might aim for perfection, but we will never achieve it.

As Wittgenstein states,

I know that this world exists.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

Modern life is very good, but it isn’t complete, perfect, or necessarily fulfilling, because it never can be. That is why I sometimes overlap with critics of modernity — including the eccentric collection of localist, anti-tech, environmentalist, romanticist, spiritualists that gather under the online umbrella of Doomer Optimism.

Yet I don’t like the doomer word at all. I am not pessimistic, fatalistic, or nihilistic about the future, rather, I believe that we humans will never be satisfied, that the Good cannot be fully captured and achieved, at least here in the City of Man.

The anti-tech critics of modernity look at data centers and see evil, see the inhuman, see the soulless, see climate change. I look at them and mutter, “aaah, the machinations of life.” They are a physical manifestation of our drive, ingenuity, and curiosity, that has liberated us from so much physical suffering, but they also symbolize the absurd lengths we will go to try and solve it all, to try and defeat a God, to remove them from the picture, to make it all about us.

It isn’t enough to walk ten miles in the suffering heat with a backpack of books, you have to keep adding more and more books each walk.

That isn’t depressing to me, but rather almost beautiful. Our drive, pride, and even hubris is our feature, it is who we are, but it also is the source of our bugs, when it makes us blind to our limitations.

We have achieved so much because of that compulsion, and now assured of the material needs (food, water, medical care) necessary for a long physically pain-free life, gifted with a surfeit of leisure time, we engage in ever more absurd intellectual machinations (we live in a simulation! It’s a multiverse! Eleven dimensions, six curled up and unobservable!), manufacture ever larger castles of complexity trying to understand what it all means, and what the Good is.

We long ago achieved the physical good, and yet we are still unfulfilled, still restless. It’s not enough we live twice as long as our ancestors, but some strive for immortality, without ever first asking, why.

I have two snapping turtles that live in my pond, who I’ve been feeding for a decade now, Reginald and No-Name. Each summer evening I tap on the water and they come swimming, their noses poking out of the muck, to get their fill of chicken gizzards.

I’ve freed them from material discomfort, from having to spend their days hunting for frogs, gorging on discarded vegetation, and so I often wonder, what do they do with their lives now? I’ve taken away their purpose, and so I imagine they now bask in the sun in a state of turtle felicity. They don’t have an internal life, not that I know of, so I highly doubt they spend the time thinking about what it all means, how to be Good and what they must do to achieve it.

Only us humans do that and while we might turn that gift into a momentary curse through our own actions, we will never be able to bask in the sun without doubts. We will always, no matter how far we progress, find ourselves in situations of our own making, muttering, “aaah, the machinations of life.”

I wish in retrospect that I’d taken more time to try and talk to Lee, but I was too wrapped up in my own schemes, and she wasn’t forthcoming, politely brushing off anything other than brief acknowledgments.

Now I walk the world talking to other people, trying to listen to them, trying to understand what drives them, and trying to understand what they see as the point of life.

Last night I was in the bar Three Sheets, that lived up to its name. I sat with two women around my age, chain-smoking, telling me of their lives, which they acknowledged as complicated, with incomprehensibly complex family trees — “So Jerry Springer, I know.”

Between the two of them they had nine artificial joints, their bodies held together by modern medicine, procedures now so routine they can be done in a day, but so fantastic in my childhood they were the premise of a successful TV show: The Six Million Dollar Man, and then the Bionic Woman spin-off. We joked about that show, with them calling themselves the six-dollar women, the cost of their drinks, yet each was thankful for what they had, with the pain diminished, their mobility granted.

When at the end of the night, when I asked them if they were happy, the more talkative one laughed between coughs, then said, “Sure I am. I’m alive past when my parents died, bless them, they had such hard lives. I’ve finally found a good man. He’s an idiot at times, but he’s still a good man. I got some regrets, who doesn’t, but you can’t dwell. You know what I mean?”

I nodded, then asked, “You lost so many people close to you. So many. You ever think about what it all means though? About death. About why we here, what’s the point of it all?” and she laughed and said, “Sure, but you can’t dwell Right? That’s God’s job.”

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The talk I gave

(Two prior essays of mine addressing similar topic: Modern Life is Good Actually, Is it Really so Much Better Now?)

I come here as a fully committed optimist, and to the degree I’m a doomer, it’s that I believe life is hard, has always been hard, and will continue to be hard, because that’s the permanent state of man — fallen, seeking the Good, but never fully achieving it.

Life here in the City of Man is rife with difficulties, it has always been that way, and it always will be, but life is getting better, and although there will be bumps in the road, mankind will endure, and will come out on the other side better.

Aristotle understood Man as an animal that can talk, and with that, reason, and with reason comes technology, and so Mankind and technology can never be separated. If reason is God’s gift, then so is Technology.

I giggle a little to myself when I see the well-intended across history, and there have always been these people, including in Aristotle’s time, when upset by the “new fashions,” confronted with the disruptions of a new invention, scurry off to try and live a life focused on a “more fulfilling past.”

As if there ever was a past where Nature wasn’t impacted by Mankind, and our technology.

Over in Foxwoods, the casino about two-hundred miles from here, there is a museum built by the Pequot tribe. It's a beautiful museum, flush with cash, because apparently monetizing the modern sins of your past colonialists is very profitable.

In that museum they have a small exhibit about Native American farming, and in it, they show the evolution of corn.

If you think God, when he created this earth, seeded it with a plant called corn that looks anything like what you buy now, and what organic farmers fleeing modernity try to grow with hoes and hard-work, well, you need to go to this museum and look at what corn, in its primordial state looks like.

It looks like a little nub, maybe the size of your finger-nail. Humans, Native Americans, transformed that, through reason/technology, into something approximating what we know corn to be now.

The point is, there is no pristine state, no technology-free world. Humans have always been up to that trick of changing their surroundings, and they won’t stop, and they can’t stop.

I also believe that while that “progress” isn’t linear, it arcs over time towards the Good. And has done so even over my sixty years on this planet.

Life is better now than it was when I was a child, and much of that is because of the technology that has been invented, and the choices it offers us.

The spiritual loss so many of you here have spoken about so well, and that I’ve also written extensively about, is not because of iPhones, and computers, and GPS, and won’t be about AI, but it is about larger issues, mostly about how we choose to use the new technology.

Or, technology is not the problem, but the culture that uses it is.

I think it is very appropriate we are having this conference here, at the Bruderhof commune, because they are a perfect illustration of that — a thriving, meaningful community, committed to the Good, imbued with spirituality and all those transcendent things we claim are being eroded by the modern world, and yet, they are not Luddites.

They run companies that have machines. They have an art magazine, a very good one, with a website. They are on Twitter for God’s sake.

When I first moved here, to New Paltz only a few miles away, I would run into some of their members, who stood out by their appearance, which tracked as anti-technology.

Then I became more familiar with them, had conversations with them, and you know, they were just like everyone else in the New Paltz, just a lot more polite, thoughtful, and happy!

What being here should illustrate to us, is that you don’t need to run away into the mountains, toss your phone into a gutter, ditch your John Deere riding mower for a scythe to find meaning, but rather, you need to find a community committed to a Good that’s beyond this earth. An external good that tempers the inherent volatility and machinations that come with the earthly part of living.

All the things we rightly criticize modern life for — the hyper individuality, the rampant technology — also provides the setting possible for communities like the Bruderhof to thrive.

Modern life provides you the ability to live spiritually IF YOU WANT TO, in a way never before possible.

You don’t have to worry about foreign invaders ransacking your village. You don’t have to worry about starvation. You don’t have to worry about pestilence. You don’t have to worry about dropping dead from a minor wound going septic.

You can, if you want to, live a long, largely pain-free life focused on living meaningfully.

Now to get back to the crux of this particular conference. Technology. Here again, as I said, I’m an optimist. I see it as another tool God provides us, and how we choose to use it, either towards the Good, or away from it, is our choice.

You don’t have to spend your evenings staring at your phone, playing Candy Crush, but instead you can use it to order any book ever written, in almost all of history, from Amazon, and have it delivered to you the next day and sit in the McDonald’s, sipping your dollar iced coffee, and read it!

I don’t think people now understand how frustrating it was to grow up, with a single library eight miles away, with a selection of texts curated by a school-marm, whose reading whims you were held captive to.

Want to read Marx? Sorry, we don’t believe a boy like you should read him. Want to read Plato’s dialogues? Sorry again, but whose dialogues? I have Peyton Place is that similar? Is that what you mean? You want the Red and the Black? What is that, a Soap Opera? (Well, yes, it actually is, but a smart one.)

The present age, and the technology of it, has allowed all of us to live a lord’s life, rich in so many ways. To live longer than ever, without physical pain, to be surrounded by spectacles a child only fifty years ago could never imagine.

But at what costs? The lack of community? Sure, a certain community is being eroded, but again, it has also opened up so many choices! This conference is an example of that. You can now form communities, and lasting friendships, with people across the globe.

You are no longer limited with what the town you grew up in offers.

Having grown up in a small town in the deep south, of only five-hundred people, prior to the internet, while I might extol the benefits of having a community you are born into, I don’t overly romanticize it either. I know the limitations.

As the John Prine song goes, “If you smoke a cigarette, they’ll be talkin’ about your breath” — and yes, that’s also the point, you want to find a community that shares your values, enough so that the other members call you out for your mistakes, hopefully though, through love, not spite.

I want to pause here to make another point. The majority of Americans still do have a lot of community, are still attached to the things we think have been lost.

Most people still live a fifteen-minute drive from where they were born, and the churches in the US are still filled, especially compared to the rest of the world.

It is us intellectuals, us wandering minds, who are the most adrift, because we are inherently always seeking, and now there are so many diversions to wander off into.

Maybe you say, the despair of contemporary life is that it is too distracting, that we have been blinded to the meaningful because of the plenty.

Pulled further into hedonism by so much cheap spectacle, then hit over the head by a bland corporatization, that’s left us both dazzled by the flashy, and then dulled by the mediocrity of modern efficiency.

Caught between Sirens luring us with their beautiful, irresistible songs into strip-malls dehumanizing us by their uniform dreariness.

This growing “corrosion of the soul” isn’t simply a result of increasing technology though, but once again, how we have chosen to use that technology.

Which isn’t only to replace dangerous, dreary, and repetitive work, but to also try and replace human interaction.

To try and reduce that interaction down to programmed rules, that then can be done by a machine. That is a big mistake, because while the machines might be far better than us at transforming nature (plowing fields, erecting buildings, digging for metals, etc.) they are not better at interacting with humans.

You can’t replicate face-to-face human interactions with a scripted procedure.

Algorithms don’t have the flexibility that a fully socialized human has — they don’t come with that sixth sense of knowing when someone’s pleas reveal a deeper concern, or someone’s momentary anger isn’t reflective of who they are, but of the situation they find themselves in.

Computers might be great at following a script, and then using it to fly a plane, but they are not good at those things that can’t be put into written rules, like how to comfort a person in distress.

Or God forbid, be at their bedside as they die. You laugh, but the idea of a computer as hospice companion isn’t far-fetched.

The un-scriptable part of being a human is what people think colloquially of as the soul, and it is why apps, computers, spreadsheets and AI, can never replace humans when it comes to dealing with other humans.

AI might momentarily change the job market, but it will, in my opinion, eventually bring back jobs for people with empathy as a skill.

That we are trying to make computers do this, is why so many people do feel trapped by the machines, rather than freed by them from the hard drudgeries of life.

We are trying to make machines do something they shouldn’t be doing.

You can’t, and shouldn’t, efficiency away the human touch.

It is in Weber’s language, disenchanting, and here I agree with the critics of modernity that a fulfilling life requires enchantment.

Thankfully modern life still has a lot of soul and enchantment left in it.

That is why I write about McDonald’s so much, which are great illustrations that the human soul, and enchantment, is impossible to destroy.

That you can find warm meaningful communities, and yes even enchantment, in a McDonald’s shows that both of these things are immune to whatever is thrown at them, existing in spades even in restaurants originally designed to be about cold efficiency.

It is why I will always be an optimist, because the machines can never destroy the soul, no matter how hard we try.

Humans are resilient, and enchantment is like the carpet too big for the room. You might try and push the bump down in one part of the room, but it will always pop up somewhere else.

Aristotle famously wrote “A man cannot live alone, unless he is either a God or a Beast”¹

And we are neither, and we will always live together, in communities of some form, and technology will always be part of that.

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Final thoughts from the weekend

For me, the Bruderhof were the winners of the conference — not that they would ever suggest that, or that there was any competition being had. This was a meeting of an eclectic group, not confined to academics as most of these things are, genuine in their desire to better the world, and make it more human. I met many people I’d only known from online, and that is always a pleasure. People shine in person, something we forget too often.

The Bruderhof are hard to explain, and once you do hear about them, easy to dismiss as some fringe oddity. They are at the most overly-simplified, Anabaptist communist, in that they live by the bible, and share all possessions. Yet they run companies, successful ones, send almost every child to college (literature, architecture, etc), and are active members in the surrounding communities.

They have two communities near me, and when after a storm a local bridge was washed away, they immediately called the mayor of my town to offer to help fix it, without a charge.

(PS: The days before the conference a storm blasted through my town, knocking down three large willow trees on my property, two across my long driveway, that made it impossible for me to leave. Thankfully, I found a guy online who quickly rectified the situation for cash, but when I told the story to the Bruderhof, who also lost trees, they all said, without pause, “you should have called us, we would have gotten you out.” I have no doubt they would have.)

To spend a few days with them, and eat with them in the shared dining hall, feasting on pork sausage made by them, from pigs they raised, and drinking beer brewed by one of the members, while children run around the community, minded by all, playing tag, or water balloon fights, all while being serenaded by a communal band, is to understand how much effort, and thought, they put into the notion of a common good. And how idyllic a life you can still live, if you do so.

When I visited one of their communities several years ago, I got a walk through of one of their factories, which makes children’s furniture, and while they use machines in the process, they also chose not to use them for certain less labor-intensive tasks, because they wanted to give some of the less physically able members a fulfilling role. A way to contribute that gave them pride.

The stated point of the conference was to think about the expanding role of technology in society, and how to maintain human dignity in the face of what can feel like an expanding soullessness.

I kept thinking though, that we should be listening to the Bruderhof, not speaking to them. Not because I feel everyone can, or should, become a member of a community built around the bible, and shared possessions, but rather because they illustrate how you can still build meaningful lives, and communities, when you make decisions built around a public good grounded in a concrete moral system.

I’m not naive enough to think the US can go full Bruderhof — or should — a nation of three hundred million of varying religions is very different from a community of three thousand of the same faith, but the old bumper sticker, “Think globally, act locally”, which they do in their way, has a lot more wisdom in it than it’s given credit for.

I would amend it to, “Think of the City of God, act in the City of Man.” Have a moral system that will make you fulfilled on your death bed, having lived a life that will make others in your community weep at your death.

More people than ever can now live a long fulfilling life, because of the machines, and among them, but it requires wanting to, and prioritizing friends over things.

Our material wealth has freed us from physical pain and suffering, but it hasn’t solved the issue of meaningfulness. That won’t be solved by the machines, that is a problem as old as human existence, and it is in the past the answers to it can be found.

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PS: I leave for Australia in two weeks, where I will be for a month. I have an audacious plan to take buses from Perth (where I will begin) to Darwin, and then Alice Spring (again), before ending in Sydney. So, once that begins, this newsletter will go back to being more travel-y.

1. The actual quote, from his Politics, is (translated of course), “He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.”