The Machine and the Garden
We control nature for societal reasons.
A small group of physicists, using calculations of the highest known abstraction, uncovered a predictable sequence of subatomic reactions that led directly to the construction of a thermonuclear bomb. It is true that the successful detonation of the bomb proved the predictions of the physicists, but it is also true that we did not explode the bomb to prove them correct; we exploded it to control the behavior of millions of persons and to bring our relations with them to a certain closure.
What this example shows is not that we can exercise power over nature, but that our attempt to do so masks our desire for power over each other. This raises a question as to the cultural consequences of abandoning the strategy of power in our attitude toward nature.
The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden.
Machine is used here as inclusive of technology and not as an example of it—as a way of drawing attention to the mechanical rationality of technology. We might be surprised by the technological devices that spring from the imagination of gifted inventors and engineers, but there is nothing surprising in the technology itself. The physicists' bomb is as thoroughly mechanical as the Neanderthal's lever—each the exercise of calculable cause-and-effect sequences.
Garden does not refer to the bounded plot at the edge of the house or the margin of the city. This is not a garden one lives beside, but a garden one lives within. It is a place of growth, of maximized spontaneity. To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be much lying beyond their vision. Gardening is a horizonal activity.
Machine and garden are not absolutely opposed to each other. Machinery can exist in the garden quite as finite games can be played within an infinite game. The question is not one of restricting machines from the garden but asking whether a machine serves the interest of the garden, or the garden the interest of the machine. We are familiar with a kind of mechanized gardening that has the appearance of high productivity, but looking closely we can see that what is intended is not the encouragement of natural spontaneity but its harnessing.
Machines are driven from without
The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself.
Certainly machines of extraordinary complexity have been built: spacecraft, for example, that sustain themselves for months in the void while performing complicated functions with great accuracy. But no machine has been made, nor can one be made, that has the source of its spontaneity within itself. A machine must be designed, constructed, and fueled.
Certainly gardens can be treated with such a range of chemical and technological strategies that we can speak of raising
food, and of the food we have raised as produce.
But no way has been found, or can be found, by which organic growth can be forced from without. The application of fertilizers, herbicides, and any number of other substances does not alter growth but allows growth; it is meant to consist with natural growth. A plant cannot be designed or constructed. Though we seem to give it fuel
in the form of rich earth and appropriate nutrients, we depend on the plant to make use of the fuel by way of its own vitality. A machine depends on its designer and its operator both for the supply of fuel and its consumption. A machine has not the merest trace of its own spontaneity or vitality. Vitality cannot be given, only found.
Nature has no outside, nor inside, is neither orderly, nor chaotic
Just as nature has no outside, it has no inside. It is not divided within itself and cannot therefore be used for or against itself. There is no inherent opposition of the living and the nonliving within nature; neither is more or less natural than the other. The use of agricultural poisons, for example, will surely kill selected organisms; it will arrest the spontaneity of living entities—but it is not an unnatural act. Nature has not been changed. All that changes is the way we discipline ourselves to consist with natural order.
Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.
Although natural order
is the common expression, it has something of a veiling quality about it. More properly speaking, it is not the order of nature but its irreducible spontaneity with which we find ourselves contending. That nature has no outside, and no inside, that it suffers no opposition to itself, that it is not moved by unnatural influence, is not the expression of an order so much as it is the display of a perfect indifference on nature's part to all matters cultural.
Nature's source of movement is always from within itself; indeed it is itself. And it is radically distinct from our own source of movement. This is not to say that, possessing no order, nature is chaotic. It is neither chaotic nor ordered. Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature—the degree to which nature's indifferent spontaneity seems to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control. A hurricane, or a plague, or the overpopulation of the earth will seem chaotic to those whose cultural expectations are damaged by them and orderly to those whose expectations have been confirmed by them.
The paradox
The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.
Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.
The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it. In a matter of months we can cut down a rain forest that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless in repulsing the desert that takes its place. And the desert, of course, is no less natural than the forest.
We make ourselves into machinery
Such contradiction is most obvious in the matter of machinery. We make use of machines to increase our power, and therefore our control, over natural phenomena. By exerting themselves no more than is necessary to operate fingertip controls, a team of workers can cut six-lane highways through mountains and dense forest, or fill in wetlands to build shopping malls.
While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks, it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be considered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker might be considered an extension of the machine. All machines, and especially very complicated machines, require operators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine.
To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.
Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation.
Indeed, we come to think that the style of operation does not belong to the operator at all, but is inherent in the machine. Advertisers and manufacturers speak of their products as though they have designed style into them. Most consumer products are styled
inasmuch as they actually standardize the activity or the taste of the consumer. In a perfect contradiction we are urged to buy a styled
artifact because others are also buying it—that is, we are asked to express our genius by giving up our genius.
Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.
We also use machinery against itself
Machinery is contradictory in another way. Just as we use machinery against ourselves, we also use machinery against itself. A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something.
When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree.
We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object of envy for others, protection from the weather. Similarly, a radio must cease to exist as equipment and become sound. A perfect radio will draw no attention to itself, will make it seem we are in the very presence of the source of its sound. Neither do we watch a movie screen, nor look at television. We look at what is on television, or in the movie, and become annoyed when the equipment intrudes—when the film is unfocused or the picture tube malfunctions.
When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there—but so do we. Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are. Morever, machinery is veiling. It is a way of hiding our inaction from ourselves under what appear to be actions of great effectiveness. We persuade ourselves that, comfortably seated behind the wheels of our autos, shielded from every unpleasant change of weather, and raising or lowering our foot an inch or two, we have actually traveled somewhere.
Such travel is not through space foreign to us, but in a space that belongs to us. We do not move from our point of departure, but with our point of departure. To be moved from our living room by an automobile whose upholstered seats differ scarcely at all from those in our living rooms, to an airport waiting room and then to the airplane where we are provided the same sort of furniture, is to have taken our origin with us; it is to have left home without leaving home. To be at home everywhere is to neutralize space.
Therefore, the importance of reducing time in travel: by arriving as quickly as possible we need not feel as though we had left at all, that neither space nor time can affect us—as though they belong to us, and not we to them.
We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere in a car. Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling.
Thus, the theatricality of machinery: Such movement is but a change of scenes. If effective, the machinery will see to it that we remain untouched by the elements, by other travelers, by those whose towns or lives we are traveling through. We can see without being seen, move without being touched.
When most effective, the technology of communication allows us to bring the histories and the experiences of others into our home, but without changing our home. When most effective, the technology of travel allows us to pass through the histories of other persons with the comforts of home
, but without changing those histories.
When it is most effective, machinery will have no effect at all.