This lecture was delivered on May 30, 2023 as part of an international meditative series organized by the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) based at Bonnevaux, France.
The author, Mark Medish, is a co-founder of Keep Our Republic, a civic organization. He is a strategic consultant, lawyer and former senior U.S. government official. He was educated at Georgetown, Harvard and Oxford. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Disclosure: As the flaws in reasoning will soon reveal, what follows was not produced by a higher form of intelligence such as ChatGPT; indeed, my words may offend the sensibility of the Bots. In the spirit of this metanoia series, my musing on human scale is more intuition than formal argument, and I will quote from a number of wiser voices along the way.
I am a child of the 1960s, a baby of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. More than midway through life’s journey, I find myself returning to the question of “human scale” which has fascinated me since childhood. For me the inquiry probably started in the mid 1970s when I found E.F. (Ernst Friedrich) Schumacher’s collection of essays titled Small Is Beautiful on my parents’ bookshelf.
I distinctly remember the volume standing near Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants, and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. Various works of Plato, Aristotle, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were not far away. My parents were Europeans who reached America’s shores from the ruins of WW2; both were spooks at one time, my father became a professor, my mother a painter, and they had a rather interesting books in our home in Washington.
I doubt that, as a young boy watching Star Trek, I understood much about Small Is Beautiful at the time, but Fritz Schumacher’s concept stayed with me.
This year, 2023, happens to mark the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication. Schumacher touched on an array of subjects including what he called “Buddhist economics.” The subtitle was “Economics As If People Mattered,” and the main question Schumacher explored was the relationship between human fulfillment and the scale of our undertakings. Small Is Beautiful captured public imagination for a few years, at least among progressives and it has retained a following, but its message of moderation was soon overtaken by the Thatcher-Reagan revolution and other exuberant ideological trends favoring rapid growth models, neoliberal economics, and galloping globalization toward a “borderless world.” These powerful trends seemed to have had history –– or at least the magic of hyped marketing –– on their side for several decades, sharply accelerating after the end of the Cold War.
Yet I believe Schumacher’s line of inquiry about human scale remains a valid concept and a relevant corrective in my life — and perhaps in the lives of others. I say this while fully acknowledging how much the world has changed for the better for many people since 1973. We are far from 1973 as that era was from WW1. Today’s new technologies –– DNA/genomics, CRISPR and pluripotent stem cell in vitro gametogenesis or IVG, Quantum Computing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence –– could hold the promise of increasing material prosperity and well-being worldwide; they are almost ineluctably increasing the frontier (and scale) of our possibilities. At the same time, digital social media are purporting to amplify the lives of individuals – virtually, globally, involuntarily, constantly. Powerful impulses in the contemporary world are geared – headlong, I fear – to using all these technologies for crossing thresholds and breaking boundaries, often without knowing why or pausing to consider what the consequences could be.
We Moderns don’t like limits. We bend and smash limits in the name of freedom. We like to do these things because we can. It’s part of our ingenuity and resilience as a species. As Bronowski argued, scientific progress has been driven by “our pleasure in our skill.” These days the Zeitgeist is all about “no limits,” transcendence of physical and biological constraints, and even a merging of humans and machines into “transhuman singularity.”
Yet self-governance demands limits and human steering. So far, the best of civilization has been based on the rule of law, interpreted by human judges, not the rule of algorithms. Without self-imposed and self-enforced limits, the experiment in democracy – which is all about limited government – is impossible. But its maintenance is up to us, which is why Ben Franklin in 1789 told fellow Americans anxious to hear about their new form of government: you will have “a Republic” – with the key caveat – “if you can keep it.” Without limits, human life itself would not be possible, or at least not recognizable or desirable. How should we think about limits?
Silver threads of ancient wisdom about ethics from across cultures and religious traditions counsel us to keep our lives in some kind of balance in the face of change. Classical thinkers posited the idea of optimal ranges, balance, and atunement of the soul. The Pythagoreans focused on the Golden Section. In his Ethics, Aristotle wrote about the importance of what he called “the mean relative to ourselves.” Kabbalist scholars trying to understand the source of meaning grappled with concepts of human limits versus the limitless or divine infinitude, Ein Sof in Hebrew. (I will have a bit more to say about Aristotle and Infinitude later.). The Hindu chakras are all about finding bodily balance between our inner and outer worlds, between the mental and the physical. These learnings all have to do with human scale in various ways. They are not linked by a single set of answers but by shared questions about strategic balance in accord with what broadly makes sense for us. At root, the idea of Human Scale is about proportions, balance, and limits— and what it means to be a spiritually fulfilled or happy human adapting as needed to changing environments, whether natural or human-made. Human scale is a measure of quality more than quantity, though quantity is certainly relevant. But how do we find the right measure when the power of our machines expands exponentially while the power of our minds does not, and the nature of our species remains unchanged? Following Maimonides, I admit to being deeply perplexed by these questions; but I still hope to emerge from the shadows one day and look up again at the stars.
Going back to Fritz Schumacher (1911-1977), his big book about the virtues of “Small” was a collection of essays, many delivered as university lectures in the late 1950s and 1960s. A German-born, Oxford-educated statistician and economist by profession, Schumacher worked for years at Britain’s National Coal Board after WW2.
Schumacher’s essays revolved around five maxims:
First, an essentially federalist preference for local decision-making and for decentralization, or subsidiarity, over centralization and big organizations.
Second, a warning not to confuse or equate the steady development of bigger, more powerful machines with human progress. It is possible for technical ingenuity to increase without commensurate wisdom about how to use it.
Third, a prudential rule that smaller-scale economic operations are less likely to be harmful.
Fourth, a caution against the twin totems of efficiency and convenience. Sometimes the less efficient path is the wiser one. Convenience can come with hidden costs. Excellence may require sacrifice. This is one reason Schumacher advocated the adoption of “middle or intermediate technologies,” trading scale for other values (social goals) such as justice, equity, solidarity, and sustainability. Here his advice echoed, among others, Amartya Sen’s emphasis on appropriate choice of technology for human development (Choice of Techniques, 1960).
Fifth, a maxim that “we should direct technological development back towards the real needs of man, and that also means to the real size of man.” In Schumacher’s own golden words, “man is small, and therefore small is beautiful. To go for gigantism is to go for self-destruction.”
Taken together, these maxims about “economics as if people mattered” amounted to a premonition of peril, a sermon against hubris, a call for metanoia, for a changing of mind and turning of perspective.
Schumacher’s warning was in phase with many other popular non-conformists such as Carson, McLuhan, Toffler and the Club of Rome authors of The Limits of Growth. I like to call them “Seers of the Sixties” – because that decade led to such a dazzling blossoming of Western counterculture and critical thinking – but their scientific and theoretical roots go back to the 1930s, 40s and 50s, basically to the world that emerged from WW1 and then WW2. It turns out that big wars and other catastrophes can help change us our minds, like an awakening after darkness, or as Homer might have sung, a homeward Odyssey on the “wine-red sea,” a journey of rediscovery of community after enduring “the wrath of Achilles” and the long, bloody wars of the Iliad.
Schumacher’s American amanuensis Kirkpatrick Sale aptly called Small Is Beautiful a “cranky, revolutionary book.” (In an homage to Schumacher, Mr. Sale – who calls himself a “neo-Luddite” – produced an interesting and weighty tome called Human Scale. Schumacher’s work is today carried forward at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, founded in 1980, in Western Massachusetts.) Small Is Beautiful may have failed to spark an actual revolution, but it became something of a touchstone for New Age economists and activists who dared to challenge the prestigious mania for growth at almost any cost and the conventional mantra that bigger, more, faster is always better.
Perhaps they were too cautious, too conservative, or just plain wrong about sustainability?
After all, the world has survived, grown and changed dramatically in the past half century. Global population was about 3 billion then, and today Earth hosts over 8 billion people. Global GDP has multiplied many times over. Collectively we are much richer than 50 years ago. Hundreds of millions of people who did not exist before have been lifted out of extreme poverty. Massive change can be a good thing.
But is our way of life sustainable? Do we have enough Earths (of resources) to keep up with demand? Are we spiritually better off? Are we living well? Are we in control of our direction and speed? Even if we have survived and multiplied and possess many more gadgets than ever, as we do, I find the questions raised by Schumacher and his fellow-travelers no less urgent today. Schumacher may have been mistaken about the timing of our reckoning, but I suspect he got the substance right. Anyone worried about climate change would doubtless agree. As Schumacher asked back then, “are there not enough ‘signs of the times’ to indicate that a new start is needed?” (SIB, 80)
To his credit, Schumacher did not have simplistic, one-sized proposals. He argued that appropriate scale “depends on what we are trying to do…. The question of scale is extremely crucial today in political, social and economic affairs just as in almost everything else.” (SIB, 71) I would explicitly add to that list: in education, family life, friendship, the workplace, our neighborhoods. Schumacher was concerned with reminding us of the human-centered perspective that should be the governing vantage point for all our enterprises, lest we lose sight of what is meaningful and worthwhile in our lives as individuals and communities. He would have agreed with what neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs (who once saved Greenwich Village and SoHo from destruction to build a highway across Manhattan) wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): “When distance and convenience set in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.”
Underlying Schumacher’s thesis was a form of metaphysics, specifically a variant of essentialism, the idea that the humans though almost infinitely varied in form (genotype and phenotype) have some species-defining qualities largely fixed by the nature of things (ontology, species-type). It is an epistemological and ethical concept that is uncomfortable for many people of today and tomorrow, for the Digital Nomads – “footloose people” (SIB, 70) would have been Schumacher’s phrase – who believe things are inherently fluid, who assume motion and disruption must be progress, and who see our upward development climb as preordained thanks to the gift of high tech.
Perhaps surprisingly for a New Age prophet, Schumacher anchored his philosophy in Classical Western thought, in addition to having some deep Buddhist affinities. His syncretic approach was on the side of Aristotle’s metaphysics, Judeo-Christian ethics and Renaissance humanism. He was not as rigid a foundationalist as Plato and did not rely on the revealed ‘truth’ of organized religions.
Schumacher roundly criticized Marxism as an ideology, but he would probably have found resonance in the so-called “Young Marx” of the 1844 Philosophical Manuscripts who focused on human estrangement (Entfremdung, alienation) from our “species-being” (Artenwesen). This was the neo-Aristotelian Marx who wrote rather attractively: “Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust only for trust” and so forth. (Marx 1844, 105).
Schumacher was particularly skeptical of certain 19th-century children of the Enlightenment and the master narratives of modernity.
He devoted a long chapter to knocking down what he called the “six large, life-destroying ideas of the 19th century” (SIB, 93). Those six ideas are: competition, Marxist materialism, Darwinian evolution as a metaphor for social sciences, Freudianism, positivism, and relativism (variants of which have been turbo-charged in the last century). He said of these theories (the horrible-isms): “The great ideas may fill our minds in one way or another, but our hearts do not believe in them all the same.” (SIB, 98). Schumacher saw these grand theories as clever, intriguing, super-powerful over-simplifications, as crude reductions of our multi-dimensional humanity – as doing injustice to the human condition – which is full of nuances, contradictions and trade-offs that defy simple constructs (whether arithmetic or algorithmic). What’s powerful is not necessarily true. Schumacher insisted that we must search for the deeper answers to life’s challenges through a sense of metaphysics (ontology and epistemology) that accords with what we know about ourselves and our place in the scheme of the universe (scala naturae).
Schumacher emphasized the need to “define our own position, the position of man in the scheme of the universe.” (SIB, 101). He continued, “It is only when we can see the world as a ladder, and when we can see man’s position on the ladder, that we can recognize a meaningful task for man’s life on earth.” (SIB, 101). (By the way, what an interesting allusion possibly to Jacob’s ladder in Genesis, to Orthodox and Catholic Saint John Climacus’ “30 Steps of Divine Ascent,” the scala naturae, and of course to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” 1971.) Human ambitions for improvement by pushing the limits of the possible are entirely rational and laudable so long as we stay broadly in line and don’t try to play God (especially if there is no God). After all, Icarus’ big mistake was not learning to fly, but doing so too close to the Sun.
As Schumacher observed, “the deeper problems of our age cannot be solved by organization, administration or the expenditure of money, even though the importance of all those things is not denied” (SIB, 107). This view was fully in accord with Max Weber, the pioneering theorist of big-scale organization and the efficiency of the modern corporatist, bureaucratic state, who warned of the “iron cage of modernity” which Weber said would be ruled by “specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart” (“Politics As Vocation,” 1919, Munich).
Schumacher concluded that “the task of our generation … is one of metaphysical reconstruction.” (SIB, 106) Well, Fritz Schumacher was basically from my parent’s generation, and I think the task of “metaphysical reconstruction” was left unfinished by them, and sadly also by my generation now heading toward retirement; it is being handed down to my children and yours. A key to this metaphysical task is always to distinguish means and ends, and never to allow means, even the most sophisticated technologies, to become ends in themselves. Again, the perspective of human scale is a way of thinking about ontology (the reality of who we are) epistemology (how we perceive and know things) and ethics (what we should do as principals and agents, subject to our limited time and the other constraints we face).
If it sounds as though I am a ‘going back to basics’ advocate, that is no accident. I believe most of the classic works of literature and philosophy we read during our school years are loaded with practical wisdom, which is often lost on young minds in a hurry or forgotten later in the press of our high-octane careers. My youngest son who just finished an Anglican (Episcopalian) high school, was recently assigned Chaim Potok’s The Chosen (1966), a great Bildungsroman about the nature of friendship against the backdrop of spiritual wrestling between two pairs of fathers and sons from different sects of Judaism. The two sons, Reuven and Dan, forge an unlikely but intense friendship after a violent collision on a baseball pitch. My son Max rounded on a key passage when Reuven’s father explains to his son: “Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? … I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning.” Significantly for the story, in this father-son talk, Reuven’s father is pointing to meaning beyond the rituals and Commandments of their shared religion.
Finding meaning – indeed, thinking about the meaning of meaning – that is perhaps our central quest as humans, after we manage to feed ourselves. Our smartest machines will not solve this puzzle for us. Faith may do it for some people, but not for all of us.
Potok’s story brings me back to Aristotle on friendship and his curious phrase “the mean relative to ourselves” and to the Kabbalist notion of Ein Sof, literally “endless” or “that with no limitation,” both of which, I believe, have something important to do with understanding the significance of human scale.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is ostensibly about political science, but a salient theme is that personal “friendship (philia) is an absolute necessity for life” and indeed a building block for the polis. When Aristotle says we are “by nature (fusei) social beings,” he has in mind “living alongside parents, children, wife, friends and fellow citizens generally.” This is what he calls “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia): not an ascetic life but one of robust communion with others. According to Aristotle, friendship is key to our chances for virtue and excellence: “anyone who is happy will need virtuous friends.” Our individualism naturally thrives in the company of friends. Friends help each other “to avoid mistakes, to finish jobs, and to do noble things.” Aristotle is pragmatic: he divides friendship into three categories in ascending order of quality, friendships based on utility (shared tasks), pleasure (sex) and virtue (arete). He sees private friendship as a metaphor for public citizenship. But there are limits and proportions at work here. Following Plato, he suggests that the polis has an optimal size and natural limits. By the same token, we may be able to have only a handful of close (true) friends in a lifetime. We cannot be full friends to everyone; such friendship is “rare because such people are few.” This sense of scale and proportionality is, I would suggest, what Aristotle meant by seeking “the mean relative to ourselves.” No matter how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter, Aristotle’s insight still holds. We need relationships, but quality will almost always be in inverse relation to quantity.
Now for some watered down Kabbalism, without too much numerology (gematria). Ein Sof, the limitless, is the place of transcendent meaning we can reach only through faith. It’s akin to the Brahman-Atman nexus in Hinduism. One of my university philosophy teachers, the late Robert Nozick, wrote “meaning involves external connections because for a limited and finite being, meaning involves transcending limits” (Philosophical Explanations, 1981, 603). Something about us, “of utmost importance to us… laden with our emotion and aspiration” (571) makes us “want meaning all the way down” (599), but our search is hampered by our inability ever to know we have found the “ground floor” (591, 605) or the “top level” (590) as the source of meaning. The problem of transcendence can be solved only by something without limits, Ein Sof, the limitless aspect of God that serves as the stopping point of inquiry. (Aside: Nozick mischievously asked what if God is unsure about the merits of his creation since he could have created anything: if so, maybe divine meaning is less stable or affirming than assumed.) Humans might try to participate in Ein Sof through “some modes of linkage” such prayer or obedience to God’s law, but precise articulation of this mode of access to the divine is ineffable. Like Nozick, I’m deeply sympathetic to this desire for transcendence but skeptical that the Brahman-Atman pathway works. Perhaps in the Age of Faith, when everybody was doing it together, it made more sense. The good news is that Nozick put forward an alternative theory of “limited transcendence” (610-11), namely, meaning grounded in human scale and what constitutes a life worth living. Nozick came out roughly in Aristotle’s neighborhood: in his words, life plans and purposes that make us feel meaningful – “children, relationships with other persons, helping others, advancing justice, continuing and transmitting a tradition, pursuing truth, beauty, world betterment – these and the rest link you to something wider than yourself” (595). In other words, we depend on each other for generating “a ball of meaning” (593) in our lives.
I would call Nozick’s view a ‘metaphysics of the middle distance’ or ‘humanist pragmatism’–– much like Schumacher’s philosophy, it is situated somewhere between materialism/relativism and theology/foundationalism. As Nozick liked to say, “there are many numbers between zero and infinity” on the scale (611).
So, the concept of human scale relates to the archetype of a life in full, the individual as a whole which combines self-realization with a community of relationships.
The idea of relationship and proportion has a fine pedigree in the march of civilization. According to the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was Word.” Significantly, the Word or Logos also means ratio, a web of ordered relationships of both quantity and quality.
As classics scholar H.D.F. Kitto observed, the Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle, had “a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the very first time what the human mind was for.” The Word was a powerful tool, the gift of communication and Reason, far more powerful than the Ancients could have imagined.
The Renaissance owed some its verve to the Gutenberg revolution which led to mass-production of the printed Word, on an unprecedented scale, and gave the rise to what McLuhan called “typographic man.” More books were published in the five decades from the 1450s than had been produced by scribes over the previous millennium. In this setting of mass typography, Renaissance Humanism evolved from scholastic humanism and revived the classical Greek ideal of a life lived to its highest purpose and potential.
The archetypical image of the Renaissance — and of human scale — is Da Vinci’s sketch titled ‘Scheme of the Proportions of the Human Body according to Vitruvius’. Vitruvian Man addresses a conundrum posed by the Roman architect regarding how one might square a circle using the human body as the guideline. Like Vitruvius, Leonardo was fascinated by how closely humans fashioned their environment both consciously and unconsciously according to the dictates of human scale. The drawing is a beautiful rendering of a centered self, with attention to human proportions, extensions, and limits. Perhaps it even gives moral permission to factoring self-love (autonomy and dignity) into the scheme of things.
The Renaissance served as the foundation for the Age of Reason and what came to be known as “Enlightenment values.” Perhaps the most elegant elaboration of this humanist ideal is found in Kant’s concept of individual dignity and autonomy and their moral corollary in “the categorical imperative”. Kant put a rigorous modern gloss on the ancient golden rule of reciprocity and mutuality — of doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves. (Note: we learn from our relationships.) The categorical imperative requires us to universalize rules of conduct and to treat others always as ends and never only as means.
To be clear, there has never been a golden age. There is no halcyon time of wholeness to which we can return as individuals or as society. Yet the concept of three-dimensional wholeness inspired by the Renaissance and especially as conceived by da Vinci and ramified by Kant still calls out to us. This ideal certainly inspired Schumacher.
Lest we jump to the conclusion that Schumacher was alone in his concerns as a quaint old-school humanist not sufficiently informed about the transformative technologies of the atomic, genomic and digital age, it behooves us to listen to another “Seer of the Sixties” – Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the American mathematician and father of cybernetics, the communications science seeking to bridge engineering and biology.
I must confess Wiener’s books were not on my parents’ 1970s bookshelves. I learned of him much more recently thanks to an erudite old friend named Bill who lives in the Berkshires, not too far from the Schumacher Center.
Wiener was born in Missouri and educated at Harvard. He was the son of Lithuanian Jews and amazingly related to Maimonides, the great medieval scholar. By all accounts, Wiener was a quirky fellow which may help account for why he is not as famous as he should be. He also declined to take funding from the military-industrial complex. His magnum opus Cybernetics (1961), was subtitled Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Based on mathematical formulae from quantum physics – analog rather than binary, continuous rather than discrete -– Wiener outlined the future development of AI. Wiener foresaw large language models, quantum computing, the Internet of Things, and the merging of software and hardware.
Wiener’s two books on ethics should also command the attention of those concerned about our collective sprint into the brave new world of “generative AI.” One book is titled God and Golem Inc. (1964) and subtitled A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. The other is The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950).
Wiener was particularly concerned about the application of cybernetics to weapons and warfare. As with Einstein and Oppenheimer, his deepest scientific insight also conjured up his darkest nightmare for humanity. The cardinal lesson of his writings is as elementary as it is difficult to follow: we must not accord technology inevitability in terms of applications. If we do so, we will be dead as species.
Wiener understood what physics could mean for digital and data technology, robotics, and automation — and for our metaphysical and societal life. He understood the (religious) portent of the fact that “man has made machines very well able to make other machines in their own image,” a God-like re-generative power. (GG 29-31). Wiener saw in the purposeful creative and reproductive power of machines (“operative not merely pictorial” self-images), the God-Golem relationship emulating and potentially challenging or supplanting the God-Adam relationship. Wiener said his essay touched on “that part of religion which is essentially a paraphrase of ethics.” (GG 93). Almost like Emile Durkheim, Wiener seems open to finding truth across the lines of science and religion. (As Durkheim wrote, “there are no religions that are false; all are true after their own fashion.” The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912)
According to Wiener: “As long as automata can be made, whether in in the metal or merely in principle, the study of their making and their theory is a legitimate phase of human curiosity, and human intelligence is stultified when man sets fixed bounds to his curiosity.” So far, so good. Go Galileo and Copernicus! Go CRISPR! Go ChatGPT!
But Wiener continued: “Yet there are aspects of the motives to automatization that go beyond a legitimate curiosity and are sinful in themselves … exemplified in the particular type of engineer which I shall designate by the name of gadget worshipper” (GG 52-53). Sinful – not a common category for scientific writers. Motives matter. This is an apt moral warning from a father of cybernetics and a descendant of Maimonides.
“We have not yet arrived at that pinnacle of sublime moral indifference which puts us beyond Good and Evil. And just so long as we retain one trace of ethical discrimination, the use of great powers for base purposes will constitute the full moral equivalent of Sorcery or Simony.” (GG 52).
Wiener even saw digital technology and automation as a form of sorcery or black magic. “Power and the search for power are unfortunately realities that can assume many garbs. Of the devoted priests of power, there are many who regard with impatience the limitations of mankind, and in particular the limitation consisting in man’s undependability and unpredictability” (GG 53). “To this sort of sorcerer, not only the doctrines pf the Church give a warning but the accumulated common sense of humanity, as accumulated in legends, in myths, and in the writings of the conscious literary man. All of these insist that not only is sorcery a sin leading to Hell but it is a personal peril in this life. It is a two-edged sword, and sooner or later it will cut you deep” (GG 56).
“The gadget minded people often have the illusion that a highly automatized world will make smaller claims on human ingenuity than does the present one and will take over from us our need for difficult thinking.” (GG 63) “That is palpably false. A goal-seeking mechanism will not necessarily seek our goals unless we design it for that purpose, and in that designing we must foresee all steps of the process for which it is designed… The penalties for errors of foresight, great as they are now, will be enormously increased as automatization comes into full use.” (GG 63)
Wiener continued: “No, the future offers little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.” (GG 69) Our honesty and our intelligence. Machines can help us, but they must not supplant us, or we will lose of the whole game. “The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence.” (GG 69). Wiener questioned our will to control ourselves and our ability to control our machines.
In his earliest book The Human Uses of Human Beings, Wiener explained how the statistical modeling of cybernetics applies to physics and intersects with biology. He touched on the metaverse – which he extrapolated from the probabilities of subatomic superposition – and on humankind’s Goldilocks-like location on the ladder of the cosmos, scala naturae, in a universe dominated by Entropy. He noted: “… while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.” (HUBH 12). These local enclaves in space and time are zones of human scale. Whether of divine creation or not, these are the unique places of our lives; they are all that we have to call our own in the vast, indifferent silence of the universe. We are the stewards of these precious but improbable “local enclaves.” Keeping ahead of extinction comes down to our wits, our will, our agency.
As yet another “Seer of the Sixties” the Canadian communications technology scholar Marshall McLuhan wrote about hidden risks and unintended consequences from the information and data revolution: “Since Sputnik put the globe in a ‘proscenium arch’ and the global village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite literally, is the use of public space for ‘doing one’s thing.’ A planet parenthesized by a man-made environment no longer offers any directions or goals to nation or individual. The world itself has become a probe. ‘Snooping with intent to creep’ or ‘casing everybody else’s joint’ has become a major activity. As the main business of the world becomes espionage, secrecy becomes the basis of wealth, as with magic in a tribal society… It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process… As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than people do themselves. The more data banks record about each of one of us, the less we exist.” (From Cliché to Apocalypse, 1970) That was McLuhan in 1970! But the analysis applies even more strongly today. All these admonitions from half a century ago about the scale effects of high technology resonate with ongoing debates about pausing the pace of release of AI technologies – if it’s not already too late.
The mixed legacy of the 20th century should be cause for considerable relief but not for too much celebration: Despite unspeakable atrocities and losses, our civilization survived WW1, WW2, the Holocaust, the savage proxy conflicts of the Cold War and the threat of WMD – we survived – but just by the “skin of our teeth,” as historian Kenneth Clark might have put it. As a species, we have made it through these self-inflicted horrors. But, if we are honest with ourselves, our collective soul is damaged and haunted by atavistic demons. Whether we will survive the post-Cold War era is an open question. Technology can help in some areas, but it will not be the wellspring for the metaphysical reconstruction demanded by Schumacher and his brethren. For that task, technology is at best a distraction and at worst a source of the trouble that afflicts us.
As we seek to use technology to emulate God’s powers, we suddenly find ourselves loitering outside the gates of Hell. Disoriented and frightened, we are losing our relationship to proportion and human scale.
A central challenge at the current juncture of the human journey is that many of the technologies rightly credited for our material progress are also based on disintegration and reduction of the individual: breaking us down into data sets of DNA, revealed preferences in digital search histories, biometrics, financial data, etc. The quest for utility, efficiency and convenience at global scale necessarily reduces us to data points. Multiple trillion-dollar industries, hyped by propaganda machines, are committed to this proposition.
The idea of the individual — literally a being that cannot or should not be divided — is one of integration and wholeness, yet it is the subject of ferocious division and subdivision in the name of progress (the market) and security (the state). In a sense, modernity constantly puts our integrity in jeopardy, and it is quite profitable to do so.
As individuals we should not be divided, but we also need to be connected beyond ourselves: we need relationships to find meaning and to thrive. (This goes back to Aristotle and Nozick.) What ultimately changes people’s lives are relationships. As sentient beings, we need associative relationships to flourish — in families, as friends, as citizens and co-workers, and as nations — we need the right scale to live as humans in full without destroying the global commons.
Technology allows us to adapt and extend ourselves beyond some of the constraints of body and place. Communications technology stretches the realm of our senses globally. This elasticity has been central to progress. Yet the question remains how far beyond the inherent limitations of being human can we meaningfully extend without losing touch with who we are. The answer is certainly not fixed and may vary across individuals and societies and time. However, it does not follow that there are no limits.
The human body is still our physiological reality, but we can make some progress within our corporeal constraints. From 1985 to 2020, a man’s ability to run a mile has improved from 3:46:32 to 3:43:13. That’s impressive. Maybe a three-minute forty-second mile is possible. Good nutrition and medical interventions have helped stretch out our lives. Our maximum biological lifespans have been increasing but seem to be topping off around 100 or 110, perhaps even 120 years for outliers. Some people dream that ‘singularity’ with machines will help us breach this biological boundary.
In the past 30 years, technological advances and changes to the way we live have taken place at a speed never before experienced in human history. Our world has never been more connected and yet we face an epidemic of loneliness, alienation and stress related illnesses. Our cluttered, frenetic, upgraded lives feel increasingly out of control. Our machines are supposed to work for us, but often we appear to be working for our machines. Technological triumphs have created new challenges, pushing some fundamental things out of joint, particularly in the less tangible realms of culture, character and spirit. Finding our balance and keeping our sanity will become ever more difficult as our lives grow ‘bigger.”
Technological change is full of consequences, intended and unintended, expected and unexpected, good and bad, invidious and insidious, to which humans must adapt. Reflecting on the course of the 20th century, the Russian poet Pasternak wrote somewhat ominously of “the consequences of consequences”. This insight has never seemed more important and has propelled us to ask some fundamental questions about how we will adapt ourselves and our lifestyles to the effects of our radically new setting, a world defined by promising and powerful technologies — nuclear, genomic and digital — that are capable of disaggregating, disintegrating, and also reintegrating or remaking many aspects of the world as we know it.
And just at this moment, we face four crises, The Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse, each capable of extinguishing our species (not to mention most others). Top of the list is the climate crisis; second are the myriad, proliferating weapons of mass destruction; the third we are now well acquainted with: pandemics; the last one is precisely our overdependency on networked computer systems and artificial intelligence.
Our deepest misfortune is that these threats coincide with a crisis in politics that has helped some of the most venal, incompetent and malevolent characters to some of the most powerful positions in the world. Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, Modi and Xi are not the cause of our problems, but they are a symptom which indicates just how deeply the problems run. For, make no mistake, the human scale challenge is related to governance.
A brief digression back to McLuhan’s “proscenium arch” view of the Earth. In 2021, when the real Captain Kirk finally trekked to the edge of outer space at the age of 91, he experienced a metanoia of sorts. William Shatner reported on looking at Earth from the stars, from a new perspective. He said he was crying and experiencing “the strongest feeling of grief.” This emotional phenomenon is something known in psychology as the “overview effect.” Shatner said, “I wept for Earth because I realized it’s dying… It’s a little tiny rock with an onion skin air around it. That’s how fragile it all is. It’s so fragile. We hang by a thread… we are just dangling … dangling together.” Perhaps space travel can help restore our sense of human scale. (NPR report, Oct 23, 2022)
If we are to meet the profound challenges we face and save the planet, then we must make sure that we remain in control of technology and that technology does not assume control over us. In the coming years, this will be the core issue affecting governance of democracies and authoritarian regimes alike.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who once mesmerized Western democratic elites with his profound critique of Communist tyranny in the Soviet Union before he antagonized them by criticizing the Godlessness and materialism of the West, had something to say about this. He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago of the line between Good and Evil: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Whatever our level of technological evolution, as long as we humans hope to persist and to thrive in our “local enclaves” of the universe, we must re-examine our hearts and attend to the care of our individual souls and those of our friends and fellow humans. That is what my metanoia on human scale is about.
It is not about self-centeredness, but about centering the self in wider relationships that can give (limited) transcendence and meaning to our lives. It’s not about humanist hubris or solipsism, but about ontological and epistemological humility. Man is small, and therefore small is beautiful.
Allow me to give the final word to Fritz Schumacher, who urged us to embrace the perspective of human scale:
“Everywhere people ask, ‘What can I do?’ The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science and technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.” (SIB, 318)
Mark Medish is a co-founder of Keep Our Republic, a civic organization. He is a strategic consultant, lawyer and former senior U.S. government official. He was educated at Georgetown, Harvard and Oxford. He lives in Washington, D.C.