An Inordinate Faith in Tools
The rise and fall of Homo faber
Without technology, we are only frustrated monkeys staring at earthen mounds, unable to extract termites from them. Without technology, we are ape-men forever doomed to cold nights in dank caves, dependent upon what few critters we can chase down and catch with our bare hands, whatever berry bushes we can find.
It’s impossible to imagine us being fully human without a few basic tools: fire, a sharp edge, and some kind of pounding or grinding implement. In a sense, our tools define us. We are not really Homo sapiens, wise man, but rather Homo faber — the primate that makes and uses tools.
An Evolutionary Success Story
The rise of humankind over the past million years or so is a success story, no doubt. We are nature’s darlings, having proven time and again that adaptability and resourcefulness are critical to survival. As Darwin pointed out over a hundred and fifty years ago, it’s all about adaptation. And that we have done quite well, thanks to all the gray matter between our ears.
We thrive in all climes, in every corner of the globe. We have made land, sea, and sky our own. We practically own this planet and tomorrow — who knows? — we may own the stars. But it’s not over yet. There is no guarantee that our kind will survive indefinitely.
Speaking of us modern men, the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote:
Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition… The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces.
Sad but true fact. We’ve mastered agriculture and animal husbandry, but weeds and pests still harass us. Microbes remain as menacing today as ever. Wind churns both sea and air, frequently foiling our plans. The land beneath our feet moves: volcanoes and earthquakes having the audacity to disrupt our carefully placed infrastructure. The planet is far from being under our control.
Meanwhile, the cosmos all around us convulses violently on a scale that we are only beginning to comprehend. Incredible tools we possess, certainly, but we are far from being the gods we’d like to be.
The Power of Tools
Power — we have it all, or soon will. Our tools enable us to manipulate anything and everything, both matter and energy. But the more we harness the elements of wild nature, the less we feel any sense of meaning or purpose. What’s it all for? What’s the point of conquering the world once the quaint values of our simple and superstitious past have faded away? Someday we will travel to the stars, no doubt. But to what end?
While our success over the past ten thousand years has been phenomenal, we are a long way away from being an unequivocal success story. Many creatures have been around much longer than us. The cockroach, for example, has crawled the earth for more than a hundred million years. What does that little guy know that we have yet to learn?
The Certainty of Extinction
In nature, everything’s optional. No branch is essential to the tree of life. The entire branch of primates known as Homo, for example, might be an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Natural history shows, time and again, that a certain balance prevails in nature. Nothing’s allowed to hog center stage indefinitely. The dinosaurs are long gone, as are many other era-defining creatures. With few exceptions, today’s state-of-the-art life-form is tomorrow’s outdated, unworkable design.
Are we paying close attention to the story written in dust and bone? No, we’ve got it in our heads that we’re something else — the be-all and end-all of existence. And because we’re so smart and powerful, billions of years of natural history means nothing to us. We call the shots now, not nature. Or so we tell ourselves.
In his book, One Cosmic Instant, John A. Livingston wrote rather prophetically:
The extinction of man is as certain as his existence.
Who cares? Surely an event of that magnitude must be so far into the future that it can’t possibly affect us now. Or is it?
Perhaps we underestimate our own hand in the evolutionary process. Quite often in natural history, it is a mutated variety of a life-form that outlasts its original. Just as Homo sapiens outlived Homo erectus, we may be replaced by a hominin that’s not much like us at all. And considering the remarkable speed of our technological advances lately — in genetics, especially — that day might not be so distant.
Failing in Our Own Way
Environmentalists bemoan the destruction of the planet, but truth is, the planet will survive us in some way, shape or form. The big question is, will we survive ourselves? Oh sure, some semblance of Homo will persist — some techno-human that can live comfortably in an entirely artificial world. But it will not be a creature anything like you and me.
Losing the wild means losing ourselves. What begins as alienation from nature ends as extinction. Homo sapiens will most likely replace itself with some kind of interface between flesh and machine. That would be the logical consequence of an inordinate faith in tools.
Clearly, we seem to be locked into a specific way of doing things. Speaking of nature, the mid-20th century writer Joseph Wood Krutch said:
Nature, isssuing her last warning, may bid us embrace some new illusion before it is too late and accord ourselves once more with her. But we prefer to fail in our own way than to succeed in hers.
If we fail in nature, it’ll be because we are intoxicated by our own material successes. If we fail in nature, it’ll be because we falsely assume that we no longer need any connection to the wild. We’ve made idols of our tools, thinking that they alone can solve all our problems, that they alone can give our lives meaning.
To prosper in any meaningful sense of the word, we must radically alter our way of doing things. If we are to circumvent our demise in the very near future, we must learn more about nature’s ways and take them to heart. It’s not just a matter of saving the whale or the spotted owl. It’s about saving ourselves.
Stating the obvious, the naturalist John Hay wrote:
Behind the world so recklessly and uncertinly claimed by poltics and economics lie the magic and inexorable laws of the wilderness, know to evry life. The flower is wiser than the machine.
Yet how many of people living today believe this? Bedazzled by our gizmos, we forget who/what we are.
This essay first appeared in The Efficacy of Wild Nature, self-published in 2004.