Homo Faber
The Machine Will Never Triumph, part twenty-one
Bowls
Take away all this crystal and silver
and give me soft-skinned wood
that lives erect through long nights, physically
to put to my lips.1
All the objects we surround ourselves with, especially those objects that are made by machines in factories, drain the life out of us. The best thing of all is to have as little as possible, and only those things that are either necessary or beautiful. For the necessary things in life, they should, ideally, be hand-made, beautiful, made to last, and be made out of a natural material. Wood is preferable to metal, which is far preferable to plastic. A wooden cup or spoon has much more life in it than its glass or metal counterpart, and if made ethically, from downed wood, it is harm-free and transmits the life of the tree to a person. But now, we surround ourselves with too many things, and the things we surround ourselves with are ugly. Lawrence makes this clear:
It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements[…] What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?2
There was still hope for the generations that created the first machines, since they still knew natural beauty, but for most in the modern world, beauty and nature are simply abstract concepts with no meaning. Now, healing the world is doubly difficult, because many young people don’t even know the basic concepts we are talking about. It is difficult to speak of the superiority of long-hand, cursive, writing when many children are only taught to print, and that quickly. Simple changes can change the world. Writing with a pencil rather than a keyboard, knitting and darning one’s own socks, etc. might not sound like earth shattering changes but if everyone stopped buying and started living simply, the world could heal. It is time to realize that smaller is more beautiful, or as Lawrence writes:
I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage when we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realize that it is better to keep life fluid and changing, than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth are man’s ponderous erections.3
All of this is a natural part of cyclical time. The Machine is the apple, and we are the world’s fall. R. S. Thomas describes our fall from grace as follows:
The one thing they were not troubled
by was perfection; it was theirs
already. Their hand moved in the dark
like a priest’s, giving its blessing
to the bare wall. Drawings appeared
there like a violation of the privacy
of the creatures. They withdrew with their work
finished, leaving the interrogation of it
to ourselves, who inherit everything
but their genius.
This was before
the fall. Somewhere between them and us
the mind climbed up into the tree
of knowledge, and saw the forbidden subjects
of art, the emptiness of the interiors
of the mirror that life holds up
to itself, and began venting its frustration
in spurious metals, in the cold acts of the machine.4
We can rise again, but to do so, we must smash the machines.
Things men have made—
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.5
Though we should always strive to make do with less, we will always need some things. Unlike all other species on this planet, humans have the need for at least some rudimentary clothing and shelter. I would add, we also have a need for beauty. As such, life’s basic necessities should be made by hand in a beautiful manner. Items made by hand, by a skilled craftsman enrich the life of the maker as well as the person who uses the object. Handmade clothes and shoes can last an entire lifetime and then some, and over time these objects can transfer life to new generations through warm memories. Lawrence describes the beauty of an old, wooden ship, compared to the lifelessness of a modern ship:
Strange to put one’s hand on the old oaken wood, so sea-fibred. Good old delicate-threaded oak: I swear it grew in England. And everything so carefully done, so solidly and everlastingly. I look at the lions, with the perfect-fitting oaken pins through their paws clinching them down, and their little mouths open. They are as solid as they were in Victorian days, as immovable. They will never wear away. What a joy in the careful, thorough, manly, everlasting work put into a ship: at least into this sixty-year-old vessel. Every bit of this old oak wood so sound, so beautiful: and the whole welded together with joints and wooden pins far more beautifully and livingly than iron welds. Rustless, life-born, living-tissued old wood: rustless as flesh is rustless, and happy-seeming as iron never can be. She rides so well, she takes the sea so beautifully, as a matter of course.6
As much as it is important to have skilled craftspeople who work for themselves, and who love what they do—working not for money, but to create beautiful things—it is even more important to be able to do things for one’s self. When the modern system falls—and fall it will—we need to be ready with the old wisdom and old skills. In a community such as Lawrence envisioned and called Rananim, everyone would be taught traditional skills, and encouraged to use them, which would result in a flowering of individuality. As Lawrence writes:
Rome fell, and Rome will fall again. That is the point. […] And it is to prepare for this fall of Rome that we conjure up a new system of education. When I say that every boy shall be taught cobbling and boot-making, it is in the hopes that before long a man will make his own boots to his own fancy. If he likes to have Maltese sandals, why, he’ll have Maltese sandals; and if he likes better high-laced buskins, why, he can stalk like an Athenian tragedian. Anyhow he’ll sit happily devising his own covering for his own feet, and machine-made boots be hanged. They even hurt him, and give him callosities. And yet, so far, he thinks their machine-made standardised nullity is perfection. But wait till we have dealt with him. He’ll be gay-shod to the happiness and vanity of his own toes and to the satisfaction of his own desire. And the same with his trousers. If he fancies his legs, and likes to flutter on his own elegant stem, like an Elizabethan, here’s to him. And if he has a hankering after scarlet trunk-hose, I say hurray. […] Unfortunately nowadays nobody has his own taste; everybody is trying to turn himself into a eunuch Mr Everyman, standardised to his collar-stud.7
Nothing could be further from true individuality that modern mass-produced, machine made objects.
Things made by iron—
Things made by iron and handled by steel
are born dead, they are shrouds, they soak life out of us.
Till after a long time, when they are old and have steeped in our life
they begin to be soothed and soothing: then we throw them away.8
Modern products are lifeless, and they suck the life out of us. These products are made in factories by machines and sweatshop labor. Mass produced objects are only suited to the mass-man, namely the robot. And yet, sometimes, even a mass-produced thing can contain some life after long-use, and it can bring us back to happy moments in our lives. An example could be a well-used cast iron skillet that has layers of seasoning from one’s parents and grandparents, and evokes memories of time spent with them and good meals. But, our problem today, is that even these objects, even the few hand made and beautiful objects we have, we either throw away or sell. This is one of the clearest signs of the degeneracy of our age. In fact, we are so enamored with new, ugly things, and feel such a compulsion to buy them, then throw them away, then buy something new that we have made conspicuous consumption into a cult, and made ugliness into a virtue. As Schuon writes:
Not to feel the need for beauty is an infirmity, not unrelated to the inescapable ugliness of the machine age, which under industrialism has become widespread; since it is impossible to get away from industrialism people make a virtue of this infirmity and calumniate both beauty and the need for it: this is like the proverbial saying that he who wants to drown his dog, accuses it of rabies.9
The rulers and slaves of the modern world are both robots, and robots can’t craft anything. As Lawrence writes:
There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness[…] We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.10
Try as it may, the Machine can never fully expunge beauty from the world. For those with eyes to see, there is beauty all around us, especially in unexpected places. “There are all kinds of beauty in the world, thank God, though ugliness is homogeneous.”11 It is time to slow down, reevaluate everything you thought you knew, and change your life. “Let us awake as soon as possible to the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell of death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the very things of the home.”12
New houses, new clothes—
New houses, new furniture, new streets, new clothes, new sheets
everything new and machine-made sucks life out of us
and makes us cold, makes us lifeless
the more we have.13
Why this insane desire to have more things, new things? It is clear that this is not an innate human desire, since most of human history shows that most people did not have these desires. Instead, the truth is that these desires have been implanted in us through a process of conditioning starting from the earliest ages of our lives. The Machine desires the immortality it can never have, so it seeks to perpetuate itself through the cycle of buying, selling, throwing-away. All of this serves to make us less than human, but only if we let it. It is best if we have too little rather than too much. “Really one gets sick of things, an endless accumulation of things, things, things. It’s really better to be like our peasants, who have nothing but table, benches and bed. For the rest, as bare as the chickens of possessions.”14 As for where all of this desire to acquire more and more things will lead us, Lawrence writes:
What does your work amount to? A great production of ugliness and uselessness. And what does our life amount to, collectively? A greater and greater acquisition of things that are worthless. A collier dies, and leaves behind him his pianoforte and his plush furniture. That is his life. There he leaves it, piled upon his young, who are striving for more pianofortes and more furniture—acquisition, endless acquisition. Humanity will disappear, and leave piles of pianos and furniture, acres of motor-cars and flying-machines and gramophones; and these, with the South Kensington Museum, and Oxford Street, and Kingsway, and the pit-hills, and the square miles of factories, will represent the human life of the last hundred years—a huge mass of matter made hideous—that is all.15
This is a true, but exceptionally sad statement. When we are gone, all that remains are some meaningless objects, most of which will end up in a landfill. When humanity goes extinct, all that will remain are crumbing buildings and a world full of waste. Rather than building up these meaningless edifices, and creating plastic objects that will last thousands of years, we should focus on building something much more important, namely the soul. As Plotinus made clear, and as Lawrence writes, life itself is a work of art:
Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. — And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. — You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.16
Whatever man makes—
Whatever man makes and makes it live
lives because of the life put into it.
A yard of India muslin is alive with Hindu life.
And a Navajo woman, weaving her rug in the pattern of her dream
must run the pattern out in a little break at the end
so that her soul can come out, back to her.
But in the odd pattern, like snake-marks on the sand
it leaves its trail.17
Man is a maker, homo faber, and as such, it is in man’s nature to create things, as evinced by ancient cave paintings, which, incidentally, are far more beautiful than anything considered “art” by modern standards. But, we are only a maker when we individually create something from start to finish with our own hands, crafting it with our hearts and souls, and putting all of our attention into the work. The alienated laborer, who is nothing more than a cog in a machine, is not a maker, but a robot. Everything made by an artisanal craftsman lives with the life given to it, but things made by machines or assembly line workers not only are lifeless but suck the life out of those who make and use them.
The machines we have today are qualitatively different than the tools that were used throughout history, and the people working in offices or factories today are inferior to their ancestors, and are incapable of engaging in true craftsmanship. As Schuon writes:
[S]ome will say there have always been machines and those of the nineteenth century are merely more perfect, but this argument contains a radical error that one encounters again and again in varying forms; it arises from a lack of any feeling for “dimensions” or, to put it in another way, from an inability to distinguish between qualitative and “eminent” differences and those which are quantitative or accidental. The old looms, for example, even when highly perfected, are a kind of revelation and a symbol which by its intelligibility allows the soul to breathe, whereas a mechanized loom is suffocating for the man who serves it; the genesis of the craft of weaving goes hand in hand with spiritual life—as also appears from its aesthetic quality—whereas a modern machine on the contrary presupposes a mental climate and a labor of research incompatible with sanctity, not to speak of its resemblance to some giant arthropod or to a magic box, a fact which also counts as a criterion. A saint might construct or perfect a windmill or a water mill, but no saint could invent a machine, precisely because technical progress of this kind implies a mentality contrary to spirituality, and this criterion is evinced with brutal clarity, as has just been said, in the very forms of mechanical constructions.
It must be emphasized that in the realm of forms, as in that of the spirit, everything is false which is not consonant either with virgin nature or with a sanctuary; everything legitimate is connected with nature on the one hand and with the sacred on the other. One striking characteristic of machines is that they feed insatiably on materials, these being often of a tellurian and darksome character, instead of being set in motion by man alone or by some natural force such as wind or water; in order to keep them “alive” man is forced to resort to a wholesale pillaging of the earth, and this is not the least aspect of their function of disequilibrium. A man must be blind indeed not to see that neither speed nor overproduction is a benefit, not to mention the reducing of the people to a proletariat and the disfigurement of the world. But the basic argument remains[…]: such technology can only be born in a world without God, a world in which cunning has taken the place of intelligence and contemplation.18
As Schuon made clear, a truly religious person could never invent machines, and I would add that a truly religious person could never operate machines. Technology and the Gods are opposite poles of the ontological spectrum. The Gods course through all of nature and all living beings, but technology only serves to sap life from all that is living. In our arrogance, we think we have mastered technology, but “the practical mastery of technology in its unconditional development already presupposes a metaphysical subjugation to technology.”19 There is much life in the arts and crafts, but there is none in modern work, so while we have life we should live, and extricate ourselves from the machines. As Lawrence writes:
all we possess is life—life must flow—making things in the passion of life—weaving, carving, building—this is the flow of life, life flows into the object—& life flows out again to the beholder—so that whoever makes anything with real interest, puts life into it, and makes it a little fountain of life for the next comer. Therefore a ghandi weaver is transmitting life to others—& that is the great charity.
Western restlessness & quick wearying comes from the fact that western machine-made objects are dead, & give nothing out. So western fashions change so rapidly etc20
One of the principle differences between modern and traditional work is that every motion for a traditional craftsman was unique, whereas every motion is repetitive for the modern worker. For the medieval cobbler, no day was alike, no pair of shoes was the same, and life was always unique and beautiful, but for the modern worker, life is always the same, one repetitive horror after another, just a series of rote, robotic movements. As Lawrence stated: “The modern virtue is machine-principle, meaning the endless repetition of certain sanctioned motions. The old virtus meant just the opposite, the very impulse itself, the creative gesture, drifting out incalculable from human hands.”21
We are transmitters—
As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.
That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.
Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.
Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living
dead eat you up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it’s only in the whiteness of a washed pocket-handkerchief.22
Lawrence makes clear a profound truth, namely that we can gain life through giving life. If we awaken a human robot, we gain life, but also by baking a loaf of bread we gain life. This is the horror of modern life: we give no life, so we never have any life to give. Pre-made bread, pre-cooked food, machine made furniture are all sponges soaking the vitality out of us. Modern life is immensely complex, but living is simple. Even something so simple as washing the dishes by hand, sharpening a knife, or even sharpening a pencil by hand can be a joyful activity if you pay attention. And if we pay attention, we will come to realize that everything modern is ugly. Not everything made by hand is beautiful, but even a poorly made wooden carving has life, whereas a factory made statue has none. Lawrence writes:
The old Englishman built his hut of a cottage with a childish joy in its appearance, purely intuitional and direct. The modern Englishman has a few borrowed ideas, simply doesn’t know what to feel, and makes a silly mess of it[…] The intuitional faculty, which alone relates us in direct awareness to physical things and substantial presences, is atrophied and dead, and we don’t know what to feel. We know we ought to feel something, but what?—oh tell us what! And this is true of all nations, the French and Italians as much as the English. Look at new French suburbs! Go through the crockery and furniture departments in the Dames de France or any big shop. The blood in the body stands still, before such cretin ugliness. One has to decide that the modern bourgeois is a cretin.23
Beauty is our lifeblood. Without beauty we cannot remain human, but turn into machine-like robots. Some people today don’t even know the joy of working with their hands, but it is something to be encouraged. Whether it is writing with a pencil, carving a statue of one of the Gods, cooking a meal from scratch, or gardening, there is joy and life to be found in these simple activities.
The combative spirit
As a matter of fact, we are better than we know.
We trail behind us an endless tradition, of combat, triumph, conquest
and we feel we’ve got to keep it up, keep on combating, triumphing,
conquering.
When as a matter of fact, the thought of this endless, imbecile struggle of
combat
kills us, we are sick of it, to die.
We are fed up with combat,
we feel that if the whole combative, competitive system doesn’t soon go bust,
we shall.
We want a new world of wild peace, where living is free.
Not this hyena tame peace where no man dare tell another he’s a thief
and yet every man is driven into robbing every other man;
this pretty peace where every man has to fight, and fight foul
to get a living, in the dastardly mean combat
we call free competition and individual enterprise and equal opportunity.
Why should we have to fight for a living?
Living should be as free to a man as to a bird,
though most birds have to pay, with their lives, where men are.
Why should we brace ourselves up with mean emulation?
If we brace ourselves up, it should be for something we want to do
and we feel is worth doing.
The efforts of men, like the efforts of birds in spring
would be lovely if they rose from the man himself, spontaneous
pure impulse to make something, to put something forth.
Even if it was only a tin pan.
I see the tin-man, the tinker, sitting day after day on the beach
mending and tinning the pans of all the village
and happy as a wagtail by a pool,
the same with the fishermen sitting darning their nets,
happy as perhaps kings used to be, but certainly aren’t.
Work is the clue to a man’s life.
But it must be free work, not done just for money, but for fun.
Why should we compete with one another?
As a matter of fact, when the tinker looks so happy tinkering
I immediately want to go and do something jolly too.
One free, cheerful activity stimulates another.
Men are not really mean.
Men are made mean, by fear, and a system of grab.
The young know these things quite well.
Why don’t they prepare to act on them?
Then they’d be happy. For we are all so much better than the system
allows us to be.24
After the last few hundred years of revolutions, wars, fighting, struggling, and “progress,” it is time humanity said “enough!” and put an end to the capitalist system and the entire modern way of life. The so-called “free” competition in a capitalist system is anything but free. Granted, competition has its economic advantages, and so judged economically, capitalism may be a good, but we should never just view things economically, nor should we order human affairs through some system. The prosperity that capitalism creates also rapes the world, deforests the planet, endangers the animals, and destroys free men and women. Any system that sets people at the throats of fellow beings is an evil system—though, in fact, all systems, by their very nature are evil. To constantly struggle, not as an innate, organic part of life, but just to make ends meet, is exhausting, depressing, and turns men from lovers into killers! In earlier times, living was free. There was no need for all of our laws and orders, and, essentially, borders were without meaning. A free man could go where he wanted, and live how he wanted. Now, look at where all our “freedom” has taken us: the gaol house, since we are in universal servitude and cannot even choose to be an artist for fear of starvation. Under capitalism, even the best of men are forced to rob other men; even artisans must charge, and charge highly or they may not be able to eat the next day. This I call a scam. No other animal goes against its nature, save for man, and no other animal causes other creatures to cower in fear. Even the lamb that runs from the lion, knows it is running towards its own consummation, but the death that man deals destroys the essence of both killer and killed, obliterating subject and object in a negative mystical experience resulting in pure nothingness, the opposite of union with the Gods.
All that is done, should be done freely and spontaneously. Even brushing one’s teeth should be done with pure attention and awareness. Anything less is a descent into automatism. A robot’s only form of consciousness is automatic consciousness, whereas traditional men had a spontaneous form of consciousness. Animals are all spontaneous and free, just like men used to be, and now are not. There still are some free men and women. Go to a remote, impoverished village and watch a craftsman making something; that person is free. Visit a billionaire in his or her office, and you will only see a sad shell of a person caged within their own hell. This system we have imprisons all of us, even the wealthiest, so the system needs to go. A good start on that path is taking the initiative in learning a craft, and practicing a faith. As Schuon writes:
What the people need in order to find a meaning in life, hence a possibility of earthly happiness, is religion and the crafts: religion because every man has need of it, and the crafts because they allow man to manifest his personality and to realize his vocation in the framework of a sapiential symbolism; every man loves intelligible work and work well done. Now industrialism has robbed the people of both things: on the one hand of religion, denied by scientism from which industry derives, and rendered unlikely by the inhuman character of the mechanistic ambience, and on the other hand the crafts, replaced precisely by machinism; so much so that in spite of all the “social doctrines” of the Church and the nationalistic bourgeoisie, there is nothing left for the people which can give a meaning to their life and make them happy. The classic contradiction of traditional Catholicism is to want to maintain the social hierarchy, in which it is theoretically right, even while accepting whole-heartedly—as an acquisition of the “Christian civilization” which in fact has long been abolished—the scientism and the machinism which precisely compromise this hierarchy by cutting the people off, in fact, from humankind. The inverse error is founded on the same cult of technology, with the difference that it is detrimental to the bourgeoisie rather than to the common people and that it aims at reducing the entire society to mechanistic inhumanity while on the other hand presenting it with an “opium” made of bitterness and frigidity which kills the very organ of happiness; for to be happy it is necessary to be a child, happiness being made of gratitude and confidence, humanly speaking. The machine is opposed to man, consequently it is also opposed to God; in a world where it poses as norm, it abolishes both the human and the divine. The logical solution to the problem would be the return—which in fact has become impossible without a divine intervention—to the crafts and at the same time to religion—and thereby to an ambience which, by not falsifying our sense of the real, does not make unlikely what is evident. One of the greatest successes of the devil was to create around man surroundings in which God and immortality appear unbelievable.25
As Schuon makes clear, the Machine is not just anti-man, but is a diabolical evil that is against the Divine. As he also makes clear, a return to religion and the crafts is the surest path to a solution to our modern predicament, but we have become so reliant on the system that this is fraught with peril and guaranteed suffering. Unfortunately, we are now caught in a catch-22 situation. Perhaps Heidegger was right when he said that “only a god can save us now.”26 But, we must try, for it is possible that the gods choose to work through us. And whether we succeed or fail, it is a noble pursuit, since “[t]he difference between production and creation is the difference between existence and being, function and flowering, mechanical force and life itself.”27 Where and how do we start changing for the better? Lawrence provides us with essential and timeless advice:
Every man must learn to be proud and single and alone, and after that, he will be worth knowing. Mankind has degenerated into a conglomerate mass, where everybody strives to look and to be as much as possible an impersonal, non-individual, abstracted unit, a standard. A high standard of perfection: that’s what we talk about. As if there could be any standard among living people, all of whom are separate and single, each one natively distinguished from every other one. Yet we all wear boots made for the abstract “perfect” or standard foot, and coats made as near as possible for the abstract shoulders of Mr Everyman.
I object to the abstract Mr Everyman being clapped over me like an extinguisher. I object to wearing his coat and his boots and his hat. Me, in a pair of “Lotus” boots, and a “Burberry,” and “Oxonian” hat, why, I might just as well be anybody else. And I strenuously object. I am myself, and I don’t want to be rigged out as a poor specimen of Mr Everyman. I don’t want to be standardised, or even idealised.
If I could, I would make my own boots and my own trousers and coats.28
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Lawrence, Women in Love, 351–52.
Lawrence, The Poems, 1:389.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 14.
D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 415.
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 185.
Lawrence, The Poems, 1:389–90.
D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 192.
Lawrence, The Poems, 1:451–52.
Frithjof Schuon, The Essential Frithjof Schuon, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005), 76–77.
Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” Der Spiegel, 1976.
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 185.
Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 151.