Modern Times
In modern times machines made many things in great numbers. That seems terribly simple and is. Machines brought a new, startling thrust to human existence. Homo sapiens have existed for two hundred thousand years; the machines that made computers, movie cameras, televisions, and tanks have existed for a hundred or so. Though the notion of modern times calls up figures such as Henry Ford and Charley Chaplin, what defines modern times is not what is human but what is literally inhuman. Without the machine, Ford and Chaplin never would have mattered in the ways they came to matter. To make one car or give one performance was not the same as an assembly line turning out thousands of cars or a movie distributed world-wide.
Although there were those like Gandhi who considered the machine “a great sin,” there were many more that drew inspiration from machines. According to Le Corbusier a house was a “machine for living.” The Soviet film director Vertov sought to align human actions and machine actions. Stalin called writers “engineers of the human soul,” a metaphorical flight blasphemous to both writers and souls, yet understandable from the viewpoint of forging an industrialized, communist society. Whether in the United States or the Soviet Union, England or Japan, modern people believed in machines. Underneath age-old faiths and secular ideologies lay the machine. To speak of “postmodern” was only to indicate a degree of self-consciousness, not any qualitative difference in the machines’ importance.
Machines are finite. A number of calculable functions are performed by a calculable number of parts. In that they die, human beings, too, are finite. What occurs, however, within human beings—ideas and feelings—are not only infinite but invisible. In modern times this has made human beings suspect to themselves. In the sense that they lie, deceive, and commit countless violent acts, people always were suspect, but not because of their un-machine-like unreliability. The dream of many an engineer in modern times was to replace people with machines. The robots on assembly lines have made that happen. It made sense: machines tending machines. What the liberated workers were supposed to do in a machine-driven world remained vague.
How hard it has been for people to resist the blandishments of machines! As they made life comfortable and exciting, there seemed no reason to resist them. Machines made the notion of progress tangible. “Will you look at that?” “That beats it all.” “I can’t believe it.” Machines filled humankind with witless wonder. Machines made everyone a child except that the imaginations of children created fanciful, idle, fraught worlds. Machines presented people with functions. Thus, people could be called “dysfunctional.”
The efficiency enshrined in material progress led people to believe that every human endeavor was susceptible to improvement. Yet making a product more efficient or streamlined or powerful was not the same thing as furthering the dignity and well-being of human beings. As was made plain in petitions, books, demonstrations, editorials, and anguished speeches, the production of ever more devastating weapons made for an unhappy progress. The politicians of the twentieth century, attached, whether they liked it or not, to the dictates of invention, often seemed like dogs chasing a car: they could not catch up however they tried. Think of Harry Truman and the atomic bomb and you have a sense of profound disproportion. Were it not so grievous, the situation would almost have been comic.
This lack of proportion was a defining characteristic of modern times. Formerly, people were bound by their environment to consider the immediate whole of life: sky and earth, land and water, man and woman, heaven and hell, war and peace. There was no getting around anything. The prodigality (so many produced things) along with the exclusive purposefulness of machines (only this widget and no other) was foreign to such wholeness whose wish was for harmony: each creature in its rightful, cooperative place, each creature’s counter-balance being its singularity. No two creatures or fashioned objects were alike. The source of that vision was not a machine but an abundant garden.
In the form of Romanticism, some indulged a longing for that garden while others denounced any such pining as nostalgia. Meanwhile, the mania of modern times—this must be done now not later—spoke to the narrowness of specialization. Life had no inherent proportions; all was will. Despite the inventiveness behind the machines, their functionality rendered them stolid. They were a sort of material rhetoric and, as the poet Yeats said of rhetoric, were “will doing the work of imagination.” What was automatic, like rhetoric, beggared imagination.
Modern man possessed no inherent stature. He was not blessed. Even if he said he had a soul (and there is the bleak irony of Stalin using that word), the society in which he lived did not care. In the crucial, traumatic episode of the modern epoch, WWI, he was pulverized. Once death became mechanized, flesh was almost laughable—so soft and easily perforated. This was not to say that people ceased weeping. They wept bitterly. There was no understanding those deaths. Whatever the war’s causes may have been, they became irrelevant in the face of so many corpses.
Soldiers deserted and many went mad but in the face of massive futility, they bore up. Perhaps that was the essence of the arch modernist Samuel Beckett. Shame, duty, loyalty to one another, those were ancient reasons, but WWI was not an ancient war. There were no meaningful, sustaining proportions. The scale of death dwarfed heroism. Yet the soldiers bore up in that moment of going over the top, often facing certain annihilation. Beckett seized that equivocal/unequivocal moment where there was nowhere to turn and nothing to say. There was only the ruined premise of another moment.
Behind that terrifying moment resided the brittle, inventive glamour of modern times. Images flickered on screens. Machines provided. Products beckoned. Weapons roared. If the metaphysical burden was near tragic, it could be pushed aside. Those, like Beckett, who picked up the burden, were hefting nothingness.
I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
I find this essay terribly sad and terribly true. And to end with those that are picking up the burden as “hefting nothing” is desperately sad.