One of the worst falsehoods people perpetrate is when they turn a continuum into a dichotomy. Are you a working mom or a stay-at-home-mom? Are you a meat-eater or a vegetarian? Are you urban or rural? Are you red or blue?
I say it's one of the worst because it has the effect of turning us, as a species, into warring tribes, as if all of life is the Super Bowl and you have to pick a side, or you have to fight over who plants corn in the most fertile field. And which side you pick is meant to say a lot about you.
I've been re-reading Albert Borgmann's seminal Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Borgmann was my mentor in college, in many ways, and I'm very familiar with his ideas, and I would say there is no thinker who has had a more profound impact on who I am now and how I have chosen to live, inching toward what I think a good life is. I think about him and his ideas a lot, and I miss him. I miss his presence in my life and in the world.
In this book, Borgmann draws a convincing distinction between what he calls "things" and what he calls "devices." Modern life is characterized by the predominance of devices. Devices are designed to deliver a commodity invisibly, seamlessly, without much effort or engagement on the part of the person receiving the commodity. The commodity can be almost anything, including things like music that we wouldn't normally call a commodity. The idea is that a device takes something that was once produced by difficult labor and/or intelligence and skill and turns it into something anyone can have at the touch of a button — or less than the touch of a button, ideally, as we see with devices like furnaces that are controlled via thermostat that you may never need to touch again once you have programmed them, not to mention Alexa and the like.
"Things" on the other hand must be paid attention to. They require skill, intelligence, bodily engagement with the world. A guitar is a thing that can make music in the right hands; it speaks of the materials it is made of and of its maker, and it speaks differently in different people's hands, depending on their skills and personality. A musical device — from a CD player to the more commodious devices we have now, such as iPods and Pandora stations — delivers music effortlessly, as a commodity. You have to think less and less about the effort and skill it might take to produce music; you simply receive it.
This is a sort of goal of modern life, the frictionless lives we are supposed to want. Many people believe that the ultimate reason behind it is to free people from drudgery to produce a new kind of human flourishing, one in which we can truly becomes brains in vats, cerebrating in think tanks and "yeasty pies of science."1
Many of us do sense that there's something wrong with this, that something is missing from modern life. We speak of the loneliness epidemic, distraction and polarization, crises of both context and meaning. We can bring statistics to bear on the problem, of suicide rates and declines in fertility, although not all the problems that one senses in modern life are proper targets of statistical analysis.
The great majority of people seek primarily technical and technocratic fixes to these problems. Yes, there's a loneliness epidemic, but the right kinds of online tools can help make socializing frictionless. Perhaps UBI and free access to mental health care could help, if we get the right people working on those problems. Why not? It's the paradigm we have, the paradigm we know, and the vast majority of people do not want to give up their devices which have made life so comfortable. It's difficult to blame them for that; many of them have made life comfortable, at least for us in the wealthy parts of the world.
For every thesis, though, there is an antithesis, so the countervailing trend is found in "tradwives" and "crunchy moms" and "the new domesticity." If you've spent any time online in the past few years, you've seen these ladies — and they are mostly women — making sourdough all the time. For some reason, they are fixated on sourdough in the same way that Heidegger was fixated on Rilke, a salve and potential savior against the alienation of modernity.
I say this is an antithesis, but of course, it isn’t; it is merely the aesthetics of an antithesis. They dress better than you, they have ten kids and $20,000 stoves, they want you to know that they know the path to a good life, a path that seems to mostly involve having a lot of money, facility with video editing software, and a staff of professional nannies (someone is taking care of the kids while they're making videos). Which explains a lot about how they seem to have so much energy for kneading sourdough by hand,2 but doesn't explain much about how I would achieve this good life for myself. Still, like anyone advertising a product, they want you to believe that what you see in the video is real, and please do not look behind the curtain tastefully hiding the dishwasher.3
But most people, I hope, understand that there are third ways. One can avoid giving oneself over entirely to the device paradigm while also accepting some of the fruits of modern life. One of Borgmann's examples of the difference between the world of things and the world of devices is in how we heat our homes. For many centuries, the way people did it was with wood. You burned wood in a fireplace or stove — or in some places peat or buffalo chips or sometimes the odd chunk of coal — to heat your home and also provide heat for cooking. Over time, technological innovations in wood stoves made those more and more efficient, but nevertheless such systems of heating remain firmly in the world of things. For one thing, and this is not trivial, they tend not to heat the whole house evenly; some rooms will still be cold, and some will be very warm, and people will tend to gather in the warmer spots. Your bedrooms, of course, don’t need to be and usually shouldn't be, as warm as, say, the room where you eat dinner, so I don't like to call this an "inefficiency" — it is good to only heat places where you need heat. So the hearth then provides a focal spot of the home, a gathering place for the family.
Another way in which wood heating is a "thing" is that it cannot be done without effort and thought. Fuel must be thought about well in advance of when it will be burned. It must be gathered, split, stacked and allowed to season properly,4 carried into the house, and so on; this all takes a good deal of physical effort. The fire itself must be started, whether from scratch or rekindled from last night's coals, each day. In the morning when you wake, the house will be colder than it was when you went to bed, signaling the cycle of the day, a connection with the world, a connection you feel in your body and you respond to using your body.
Heating with wood also provides useful work to all the members of the family who want it. Heavy work such as sawing and carrying large rounds of wood is usually done by the strongest people, while the chores of splitting and stacking can be done by children in the middle grades, and gathering kindling and tinder can be done by even very young children. I think it is traditional and common, in part because the fire is often also used for cooking, that the fire is started and mainly tended by the mother or woman of the house, but being taught how to start the fire is a significant rite of passage for the household's children, a moment when they know they are trusted. They have come to understand, in the way that only people who routinely see and engage with the dangers of the physical world can understand, that the accoutrements of the hearth hold danger, and they have learned the importance of treating that danger and the life that it provides with respect. Being trusted to do it themselves feels good to them because it is dangerous and trust with dangerous things must be earned.
Every time we bring in a load of wood, it gives the men of the neighborhood a chance to gather and talk about it. It’s one of the most reliable meetings we have with our neighbors, in fact. Part of it is that you are visibly outside doing work they can relate to with an obvious topic of conversation: wood and its properties. They are all accustomed to heating with wood, and they want to talk about the wood with you. When one heats with wood regularly, one comes to know wood, in a different way than the carpenter, because the properties one cares about when heating are different than when one is building. Some woods burn hot, some light easily, some are hard to split. You learn the look and feel of wood that isn't yet seasoned well enough and so must be stacked and allowed to dry. You see some wood that is more rotted than you had previously realized, and you know it won’t burn well, but it's not nothing, it can still be used.
So, even modern wood stoves, which are a technological improvement on old wood stoves and certainly on open fireplaces (which are basically useless other than for aesthetics) are well within the old world of things. They involve the body and mind in a great deal of effort; the heat one gets from them is not a commodity delivered without thought or engagement with the world. I am glad we have one, I am glad it is our main source of heat, I am glad that Chris (who is a city boy, unaccustomed before I met him, to the seasonal cycle of having vast piles of wood to split and carry) has taken so well to it.
But we don't only have a wood stove. We also have a furnace that is thermostat-controlled, runs on propane, and delivers heated air without any effort on our parts from a central location. The furnace is a good example of a device. The heat is a commodity to be delivered effortlessly, without thought or engagement with the world, to all the rooms, allowing people to disperse to their various bedrooms if they wish. It is the opposite of the wood stove. We even have our propane company refill our propane tank on a regular basis without us having to intervene or do anything except make sure enough money is always in our checking account for when the auto-draft comes. It is the very essence of the modern, commodious, seamless life. The furnace is in the basement where one needn't even see it! How delightfully modern!
But you see I am glad that we have the furnace and the propane as well. I am glad that on the coldest nights, I do not have to wake frequent to make absolutely certain the fire never goes out lest the pipes all freeze. I am glad that I can turn the thermostat up when I wake up, if it's very cold, and have a little boost of heat while I'm waiting for the fire to get warm enough to heat the house. I am glad that I do not have to choose entirely between living with some comforts of modernity and being engaged with the physical world in real ways.
For while having the furnace does make our life somewhat better, having the fire makes it quite a lot better. We spent one winter without it, and it was miserable. Heating the air isn't nearly as comfortable, in terms of how warm the inhabitants of the house feel, as heating objects is, and the fire does radiate heat that heats objects. Those objects then feel warm, and they continue to radiate warmth into the environment long after the fire has died down. It feels so much more luxurious than the furnace does, which is funny considering how much work preparing for and managing the fire is.
We live this hybrid life in many ways. We use the washing machine to wash clothes but we hang them out to dry, a process that gets us out into the sunshine and makes our clothes last longer to boot. We buy nearly all of our meat and vegetables from local farmers, but we also buy pasta and rice from far away and sometimes get chili crisp and California citrus mailed to us. Most of our furniture has come from thrift stores or hand-me-downs from our parents, but recently we bought a dishwasher and wanted a durable and easy to maintain dishwasher, so we bought the one Wirecutter recommended. We play instruments and also listen to Pandora stations; I still read aloud to the family every night, like an old Norman Rockwell painting, but we also listen to audiobooks delivered through my smartphone to a Bluetooth-connected speaker.
The thing is, it is easy to become mindless about what you're doing. Everything in our society is kind of pushing you to become mindless about how much and what you consume. It is easier to become disengaged from the challenges of the material world, the seasons, the discomforts, the irregularities of it, than it is to meet those challenges, and so I do think it is important to interrogate oneself and the ways one finds oneself living.
The device paradigm is meant to make you not notice that real energy is being expended to bring you the necessities and comforts of life, and so most people do not notice. Food is simply in the grocery store; propane is simply in the truck that fills our tank. This is, of course, never true, and so honesty compels us to ask ourselves if the ways we are spending energy are wise and good, true to our beliefs. I heard it said one time, and I do not remember by whom, that every poet is at heart a moralist. Perhaps it is true. I am certainly no counter-example. It isn't that people choose to use one or more of the devices of modern life that bothers me. It is that we easily accept these things even when we know, if we think about it for a minute, that something is amiss.
When we first moved here, my elder son had a hard time. He was very angry at me for having made us move twice in the past two years; he felt that just when he was starting to make friends and feel comfortable in a place, I took that away from him. To be clear, he wasn't wrong; I did that, although not, of course, for that reason. I was worried about him, aching with worry that it would be in this critical time that he would start to make the kinds of bad life choices that are hard to correct. He said he felt he had no right to be angry and that he sometimes felt like doing something aggressive to act on anger he felt he shouldn't have. I told him that I thought he had a perfect right to be angry — it wasn't unreasonable at all — and that if he felt like doing something aggressive, there was something both aggressive and prosocial he could do right in the backyard: split wood. And he did, and it did help. It wasn't the only thing we did to help him, of course, it was just one piece of it. But it was a piece he had access to at any time he chose, which you can't say about many methods of therapy.
My younger son has recently learned he is now strong and sturdy enough to split wood, and now we can hardly stop him. He is out there almost every day, getting exercise and sunshine, building strength, and feeling profoundly useful. He doesn't have to ask permission to go do it; he isn't graded on it and won't get in trouble for doing it. While his body is splitting and moving the wood, his mind can be thinking about anything he wants. Then he comes in and does math and works at writing a video game.
A hybrid life is like that: it leaves time and energy for the kinds of mental, self-involved work that we celebrate while alleviating a lot of the alienation and vague depression that tends to result from too much of that. My goal here is not to convince you that it is necessary to make all your food from scratch in order to live a good life. My goal is to convince you to be thoughtful about the continua that are presented as dichotomies: you must be modern or medieval, you must be white collar or blue collar, using your head or your hands to work. I think this kind of thing used to be common sense, but as software has increasingly eaten the world and convinced us that "frictionless" is a goal worth striving for in attaining the necessities of life, I see fewer people questioning whether spending their time after work involved primarily in abstracted disengagement from the world, especially via relatively passive entertainment, is actually good, rather than simply easy.
This resistance to dichotomies is one of the reasons I was attracted to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In it, he says that all the virtues lie on spectra between extremes, which are both vices; courage, for example, is a virtue with regard to how we face fearful situations with appropriate confidence. Recklessness and cowardice are the two extreme ends of that spectrum. One is the vice of too much fear, the other is the vice of too little fear. Courage is the mean. What constitutes a courageous action changes depending on the situation and the person doing it. Some people naturally lean toward cowardice, so to find the mean, they need to lean a little harder toward recklessness; some people lean naturally toward recklessness, and those people need to chill out and lean more toward what seems like cowardice to them, to find the mean that is courage. It is better to lean more toward recklessness if one is storming the beaches of Normandy than if one is trying to jump a motorcycle across the Grand Canyon, an action that can never embody the virtue of courage.
We live in a time that is so saturated with comfort, frictionlessness, ease — devices — that like the person overly disposed to cowardice, we have to lean hard into the opposites: discomfort, burdens, physical engagement with the world — in order to find the good life. To someone who is very comfortable and inclined to stay that way, going out to split wood or cooking all your food from scratch seems insane, like throwing yourself into a battle seems to a person inclined not to recklessness but to cowardice. But one must.
One must become a little bit insane these days, to find the good.
Sorry, this is a quote from Fisher’s Hornpipe by Todd McEwen, my favorite book. In it, our hero, William Fisher, works in an institute of science in Boston and grows increasingly alienated from his life.
Having nannies is trad, of course, but trying to hide it isn’t.
It is an exaggeration to say this kind of online phenomenon is even an aesthetic antithesis. By producing this “beautiful content” and relying on you to watch it and buy the products they are hawking, they, too, are encouraging you to remain firmly within the device paradigm. You’ll be scrolling so much you won’t have time to have ten kids of your own, sorry.
This last part, about seasoning, doesn’t so often apply to wood-burning where we live, because usually we harvest wood from the forest by cutting up trees that were already dead. If they are only recently dead and down, though, then they might need more time to dry out before we burn them in our stove.
What a lovely post.
I think a big part of why I'm drawn to the SREish end of the software spectrum is how it allows (and, sometimes, compels) one to take the panels off devices and expose some of their thingishness. (In the cloud computing context I'm being metaphorical, but I've bled on servers back in the day, and threatened them with a screwdriver.)
"I put logs in here, they're supposed to come out _there_, but my logs aren't coming out!"
*gentle sigh* "Ah, you have angered the great and terrible daemon Fluent-Bit, and in its wrath it has banished your logged field to the realm of shadow. Here, please follow this schema."