Two Futures

Consumers vs Makers/Wonderers

Gingrich, forever the futurist, envisions a coming American golden age delivered by technology that must be harnessed but not constrained by the government.

“There’s going to be an explosion of innovation on a scale you can’t imagine over the next 20 years,” he said, predicting today’s 20-year-olds would live to 115 and eventual migration to the Moon and Mars, to include “Four Seasons or Ritz Maui-type space station hotels.” Politico

This is the future that optimistic Americans in our current consensus reality envision. It takes the world we have created since the Industrial Revolution and extends it out into the future. In this imagination of the future, the only thing that really counts is technological advancement.

If you’re a betting person, you’d probably be wise to put your money on the likelihood of such a future than to put it on any future I’ve been imagining in my utopian thought experiments. Nevertheless I’d argue that while parts of the Gingrich conventional view are likely, it’s unlikely to be the main story because it’s a picture of the future that most people deep down don’t really want. It’s a new iPhone. It’s just more of the same, and most people if they have any measure of sanity are sick of it. We don’t want novel; we want original—something that arises from the origins.

What’s my basis for making such an assertion? It’s implied in much of what I’ve written here, which is that people don’t want more tech; they want Reality. They are starved for Reality. Their attraction to tech is a compensation for all the ways that they are frustrated by their alienation from Reality. They settle for junk food rather than something more nourishing. The problem, of course. is that junk food for the soul abounds; it’s everywhere and easily obtained, and nourishing food is scarce. In fact, it’s something you have to make or grow for yourself. And in a society infatuated by how much stuff tech does for us, we’ve all but lost the lore for how to grow or make or to do anything for ourselves anymore. We do what we’re told to do at work, we come home, and we consume. Not all of us, but too many of us.

If the future there will be two kinds of humans—consumers and makers. Gingrich’s future continues the consumer trajectory we’ve been since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It’s a trajectory that has transformed societies that were maker societies into consumer societies. We have been persuaded to think that progress is making less, and consuming more. We’re nearing the terminus of that trajectory insofar as we’re creating machines that will do and make everything, and then our life will be almost completely consumptive. If we buy into the techno-optimist vision, it’s gonna be great, right? We’ll all be sitting by the pool with some robot dropping grapes in our mouths. No more grind, no more drudery—that’s the life, right? No, it’s not. It’s a bore. It ends either in Brave New World or WALL-E.

Consumption is boring—it builds nothing, makes nothing. Building and making are interesting. Making something together with others is the most interesting. At some point we’ll figure this out, and it will lead us to a renewed sense of the vita activa that is not available to us now.

You know what else is interesting? ‘Discovering’. Mostly we think about discovering as exploring the world outside of ourselves, traveling to strange and exotic places (if you can find them anymore), but the primary metaphor now for us is space exploration. The problem for me about space exploration is that once you get there, then what? That’s the main reason we stopped going to the moon. What’s the point? The cooperative effort to get there was interesting; actually getting there, not so much. It had some novelty value for about a New York second, and then…? Will it be any different when we get to Mars?

I totally get how we admire the intrepid astronaut as an icon of the questing human spirit who go boldly where none have gone before. But isn’t there a mostly unacknowledged hope that we’re going to find something out there that we can’t find here, i.e., the aforementioned Reality that we are all starved for? Didn’t find it on the moon. Won’t find it on Mars, or anywhere else out there, I’m afraid to say.

Have you seen Project Hail Mary? I don’t recommend it unless you have nothing else to do with a ten-year-old in your life. It’s essentially the story of how the Ryan Gosling character has to travel a gazillion miles into space to make a friend of a spider made out of rocks, and then they do something together. Talk about a loaded metaphor.

Real discovery is the uncovering or recovering of the connections we are no longer capable of feeling—with nature, with one another, with the spiritual world—with ourselves. And the only real path of discovery in that sense is the vita comtemplativa. What is that? It’s the practice of paying attention to the world around and within you to see what unexpected thing might show up. To use Hannah Arendt’s language, it’s an activity that “begins with ‘wonder,’ and ends (at least in Plato and Aristotle) in the speechless beholding of some unveiled truth.” It’s the unveiling of truth that we want, and we think we get that by going out there, but there’s nothing to find out there except rocks and sand unless there’s something within us that has awakened to see more. And maybe if we were better at that, we might be ready to take another trip to the Moon or go to Mars and find there something worthy of our wonder. Right now we’re not built for that.

So, sure, the future as imagined by our techno-optimists is one possibility, indeed the likely possibility if we stay on the same trajectory we’re on now. Why do I think another, better, more interesting future is possible? Because the techno-optimist future is essentially boring and nihilistic, and we hunger for more—and more, in fact, is available if we’re willing to do less consuming and more making a life together with others. That requires, imo, that we retrieve an older sense of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa in way that makes sense for the 21st Century. And neither is possible so long as we remain mostly passive consumers.

What will push us toward such a retrieval? Our finally realizing that the techno-optimist’s future is a bore, that there’s no there there. It’s more of the same no matter how novel our tech overlords try to persuade us it is. We don’t want the novel; we want the original because only that which discloses itself from the ‘origins’ is truly full of wonder. And that’s what we really want, and it’s there for us if we learn to pay attention. And if a quorum of people start paying attention in this way, they will have an impact on everyone else, and something truly original will become possible for us together.

Why am I optimistic that this might happen? I just believe that the human spirit wins in the end, and the human spirit doesn’t want the counterfeit thing that New Gingrich and Silicon Valley imagine as our future. The human spirit wants the Real Thing.