Modern machines are amazing, complex, intricate. There is not a task that they cannot do and do better than a human laborer. No longer do people have to spend hours over the washboard or churning butter or grinding grain; no longer do people have to spend hours in the fields or fashioning things. Instead, all we need to do is run our machines and call someone if they happen to break down.
Our machines save us from toil, but their unintended consequences are obvious: We are now sedentary creatures, our muscles withered and our stomachs overgrown. Yet not many of us would trade our posts in factories and offices to be back under the sun on the farm day after day, plowing and churning just to have bread with butter. Our limp frames may be a price we are willing to pay for this convenience.
Until now we could still hold the line. We could turn inward, to the life of the mind, for the satisfaction of production. We could spend our time dreaming up new machines and procedures. We could problem-solve when they broke down. We could think, create, innovate.
Yet our machines today are accomplishing another revolution, one saving us from the effort and skill of creating and making. AI machines are able, at our command, to spew forth splendid images, catchy music and even surprisingly passable student papers. While the first waves of machine technology enervated our bodies, this one threatens to enervate our souls.
Freedom to select, consume
If we outsource our creativity, if we are no longer creators and makers, what are we humans reduced to? It’s simple, really. We become the one who chooses. Our ability to exert our preferences finds free rein. We have freedom to select what occupies our time. We are the mouse-clicking or thumb-tapping viewer of the spectacle unfolding before us.
It is astounding what is at our finger tips. We are better off than royalty in ages past. King Saul summoned David to play his harp and cheer him up, but each of us with a device can summon legions of musicians at any moment. In this way, we are all monarchs surrounded by technological servants whose only aspiration, it seems, is to keep us well pleased or at least distracted.
But in yielding to this urge, what do we become? Consumers, not producers. We become the animal that binge-watches, binge-eats and binge-consumes. And despite all this binging, we are not full. We are instead hungrier than ever.
Hegel identified the hidden nihilism of this endeavor. Consumption is fleeting, since it is based on something temporary and accidental: pleasure. Production, by contrast, is enduring since it involves our investing the material world with our thought.
The art we view, for example, can be seen and gives pleasure, but for the artisan it is a source not only of pleasure but also of pride and self-understanding: I am the one who fashioned that.
Anyone who has ever created anything, be it a book, a poem, a plan or a dish, knows that it is not only a matter of our sense of self but the very savor of life that is at stake. David with harp in hand knows a joy that Saul listening to him cannot know.
As Plato observed, life craves creativity and procreativity. To create involves a divine enthusiasm, a participation in a higher order of exaltation, which renews life. To create is to discharge lightning bolts as though one were Zeus or Thor. It is also among the greater things one can give: to turn primordial soup into something steeled with order and intelligibility.
We humans gain nothing in trading mind-numbing labor for mind-numbing consumption. Both kill the same human spirit, for both drive the life out of us and consign us to an empty state of exhaustion. Yet if we together embrace our vocation to create, we can replace those empty hearts and bloodshot eyes with joy and clear vision.
Restore The joy of handicraft
There are some signs of renewal and thus of hope. Friends smoke meat and brew craft beer. Some delight in yard work without power equipment. Some dare to camp without electronic screens. Others forgo the ease of AI generation and not only write on-screen but occasionally reach for pen and paper; still others do the same for images, brushing paint on canvas or rubbing graphite on paper.
These are signs of a different relation to nature and to our own bodies: To restore to our living frames something other than pushing buttons – to restore to our hands the joy of handicraft and to our soul the elevation of creativity.
What’s more, part of authentic enjoyment is the thought of the chef, artisan, painter or writer who brought this into being through skill and labor. There is thus greater enjoyment possible of things fashioned by us, even if they are imperfect, than of things coughed up by anonymous processes, even if they are flawless. As every parent of a young child knows, the influx of soul into even imperfect creations is the deepest source of appreciation.
Today we are on the verge of realizing a wish, or half wish, made at the start of modernity: Would that there were nothing more for us to do. Yet that wish makes our body little more than a life support system for our consciousness, which is always on the verge of boredom, and it makes our consciousness nothing more than a gaping hole – one that simply cannot be filled.
Chad Engelland, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas. This is shortened from an article published at www.wordonfire.org.