Peering Over the Precipice
Job and his tested faith. Frankenstein and his marvelous monster. Luddites and their losing battle. Me and my unsolid ground.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Job. And about Frankenstein. And about the early nineteenth century would-be revolutionaries known as Luddites. And I’m thinking about artificial intelligence and actual intelligence. I’m thinking about efficiency and meaningful work. I’m reading four books at once reaching, desperately, for stories to help me make sense of the story we’re all in. The inevitability of technological progress. The desire to return to a simpler time—whatever that might mean. The feeling that we’re on the brink of something big and bad that we can’t possibly understand, that we maybe could stop, but that we definitely won’t. I’m worried.
First: Job. You know the story. Job is a good man, faithful to God and he has everything he needs. Then, because the Devil dared him, God takes it all away. Job is ruined, but he remains faithful. That was the bet, after all. God wins. In the religious studies course that I’m teaching, “Stories of Belief,” we read an excerpt from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, in which she writes a letter to her pastor informing him that she is quitting the church. The brilliance of this short chapter is that she never says why, or tells the reader what she put in the letter, but at the end, when she’s invited to have a conversation with the assistant minister, we get a hint: she’s unsatisfied with Christian answers to the problem of evil. She’s read Job and C.S. Lewis and neither mollifies her.
Frankenstein. I’m spinning an essay idea around in my head; Frankenstein is having a pop culture moment. This year when I began my classes by asking students about their favorite books, several said Frankenstein. I’m not exactly sure why—is it trending on TikTok? There’s apparently a new film based on the story, Lisa Frankenstein. And, last year, indie rock band The National released an (excellent) album titled First Two Pages of Frankenstein. I’ve just now read that a new film adaptation is in the works, directed by Guillermo del Toro. For some reason, the story of a technological marvel that turns monstrous fascinates us right now.
Finally, the Luddites. Sometime last year, for reasons I no longer remember, I purchased a used book that was published in 1995 titled Rebels Against the Future. It’s a historical account of the original Luddites, textile workers in early nineteenth century England who raided mills and destroyed machinery meant to put them out of work. The fact that the book is nearly 30 years old is precisely what I like about it. Do you remember 1995? For many, myself included, it was the last pre-internet year. The author, Kirkpatrick Sale, is writing from the precipice; he couldn’t have imagined what would come next.
From Job: we think we understand the forces directing our life, but we don’t. We can’t. And we can’t rule out the possibility that it’s all a cruel cosmic bet.
From Frankenstein: we can’t control the things we create. We can’t predict how they’ll be used or what they’ll become. We can’t pretend that we know what we’re doing when we get to play god.
From the Luddites: we can’t resist—not really. And also, maybe we should. Most people probably think of the industrial revolution as an unmitigated good, but what if you liked life before?
There are forces at work, set in motion long before any of us were alive, that make the way we live now feel inevitable, that make technological innovation feel like progress. But ideas like efficiency, automation, and convenience are not necessary and uncontested goods. A couple of nights ago, as I was moving damp laundry from the washer to the dryer, I thought about how fortunate I am to have a machine that does this work for me, freeing me up to do…what? Maybe my time would be better spent hand washing my clothes? Maybe I’d have more appreciation for each item? Maybe I’d think for even a second about where they came from? Maybe I’d care for the people who made them? Maybe I’d own less?
I don’t want to handwash my clothes, not really. But I also don’t want to pretend that my time is so valuable that I couldn’t. Or that the fact that I own a washing machine, thus freeing up my time, marks progress for everyone across the globe.
I once sat between two philosophers at a deli in Hoboken, New Jersey and listened to them argue about whether humanity actually gets better. Prior to that day, I had never thought about it, never questioned it. Of course we are progressing. I don’t remember any of the points that either philosopher made; I don’t remember who won. But I do remember feeling destabilized, like the ground I thought was solid was really made of rotting wooden planks, shifting endlessly over a never-still sea. I feel that feeling often.
Every once in a while, something steadies me. For the moment, I’m holding tight to a sentence I read last night in Meghan O’Gieblyn’s amazing book God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. She writes, “meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification.” When we forget this truth, she continues, we “build machines in our image that do nothing but dehumanize us.”
These stories rehumanize us: Job and his tested faith. Frankenstein and his marvelous monster. Luddites and their losing battle. Then there’s me and my unsolid ground. We are on a precipice. We are going over. We are almost always already gone.