The amorality of tech

and the illusion of superiority

Photo by Specna Arms on Unsplash

There is a nice book by Michael Crichton, Timeline, in which some historians find themselves in the Middle Ages. (yes, I do love escapist fiction; I even write some.) The best thing in the book is that the author managed to avoid the ugliest and most absurd cliché of time-travel fiction, and his characters are not somehow superior to people from that other moment in time. In fact, they find again and again that some black legends about that time were wrong. Of course, the awful movie version reverses it, to the point of having a character saying they had centuries of superiority over the guys chasing them. Ugly, indeed. But movies, like camels, are made by committees.

Recently I read another time-travel book — in fact, a trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time, by S. M. Stirling) — in which a whole islandful of XXth-Century Yankees become the contemporaries of Ulysses when an unexplained phenomenon brings the entire island to 1250 b.C. What Crichton managed to avoid, Stirling brings in spades. Even if he has the delicious idea of having some idiotically innocent characters see the human-sacrificing and cannibal Olmecs as Noble Savages and get killed in the process, he portrays the builders of Stonehenge as precisely the kind of sexually-liberated, matriarchal, “wise”, and peaceful Noble Savages his characters mistook the Olmecs for.

But that’s not the worst.

What makes his characters the superiors of the Bronze-Age people is their technology, more precisely their killing tech. From superior weapons to more-efficient military tactics, the fact that they can kill much more people much faster than the “natives” rises them so high above the others as to make them automatically nobles (several “regular person” characters marry members of the highest classes, Ulysses himself becomes an XXth-Century villain’s right-hand-man, etc.). All that killing tech makes them some kind of BORG, assimilating in their midst the greater part of the British Island’s population (WASP — White, Anglo-Saxon, and Pagan — cannon fodder, mass-murdering mercenaries on the path to full citizenship) and waging total war all over the Ancient World. It gets to such a murderous point the villain ends up seeming a nice guy sometimes.

A long time ago I read another escapist title with the same basic idea, 1632, by Eric Flint. I would have liked to reread it before writing this piece, but I confess I do not want to suffer through it again. It’s the same basic idea, but this time a landlocked West Virginia town ends up in 1632 Germany, smack in the middle of the Wars of Religion. All they have is their wonderful killing tech and their temporal superiority. Quite annoying, even if it does work as escapist fiction.

The dean of that kind of stuff, of course, is the great Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In it a very ingenuous and (XIXth-Century) tech-savvy guy appears at King Arthur’s Court and — due to his temporal and technological superiority — becomes quite important. It’s interesting to notice that Mark Twain’s character, being a XIXth-Century man, is still able to know and reproduce essentially all technological means of his time; in contrast, the late XXth-Century characters in the other books I mentioned cannot reproduce much of what they brought with them to the past. I’d venture Stirling probably picked the island of Nantucket to go to the Bronze Age because it’s a tourist trap with plenty of (decorative) XIth-Century tech to be employed and reproduced.

Anyway, what shocks me most in the books mentioned and in much of that niche genre is the assumption of superiority due to superior (killing) tech. For me, and probably for the people in the times they end up, it would be the exact opposite. A murderous mob is something horrible, but a murderous Modern army waging total war is much worse. Likewise, even if superior weapons may seem a godsend to the warriors on the side that has them, society as a whole would not see them as such, much less assume that those who have superior tech are automatically better than those who haven’t. When crossbows appeared in Medieval Europe, for instance, their users were stigmatized as cowards and murderers, and the Lateran Council (XIIth Century) forbade the use of that weapon in wars between Christians.

Total war, however, is inseparable from Modernity. Likewise, the foolish illusion of superiority is also at the core of Modern thinking. Together, they gave us what John Grenier considers the quintessential American way of waging war: “extravagant violence” employed against not only enemy combatants, but also against their families and livelihood. I would say it’s only quintessentially American insofar as the USA are the quintessential Modern country. Total war is the Modern way of war, in which the universalization of Reason becomes the universalization of destruction; in which the reduction of Man to numbers and categories makes genocide (and genocidal war) possible and even preferable; in which “God is with us” (something that after all can be kind of tested in the battlefield) becomes “we are better” — a premise that makes defeat the prologue of another, way more violent, war. Such was the case, for instance, when Germany was defeated in WWI and Nazism used this “superiority” discourse to rise from the ashes of the German Empire and start WWII.

Throughout History, the most common view was that man and society got worse, not better, with time. Paradise was something in the past, something lost. Modernity upended this by placing Paradise (or Utopia) ahead. Comte, in his oh-so-Modern mediocrity, is the anti-Hesiod, replacing the latter’s phases of human decadence with those of a “positive”, “scientific” progress as unwarranted as Hegel’s spiritual-but-not-religious eschaton-immanentizing philosophy of History, later fully reduced to the crassest materialism by Marx. Of course, the popular view of Darwin’s theory, in which living beings get better and better instead of just better adapted to the particular situation at that time and place, springs from the same upending of Human History.

All these theories in which man gets better and better, in which Paradise waits for us at the end of time, are just projections of the same essential vice, the first among all vices, the first deadly sin: Pride. Pride makes us mistakenly believe we are better, and with us comes all of our era, our culture, our civilization. Even if, or rather especially if it is quite obvious that we are not at all better than our ancestors.

The same unchecked Pride that made Modernity believe they were the first to use (and worship, in fact) Reason made them become the first to wage total war with conscript armies, perform industrial genocide, and place themselves on the steps of a stairway to (not from) Paradise. Perhaps the only thing that could be said to have indeed “evolved” (in the popular sense of getting better and better) was technology, especially that used for murder. Most of the stuff that does make our lives better, or at least easier, is derived from technology originally developed for war. Murder tech.

But technology is neither moral nor immoral: it is amoral, totally deprived of inner means to define whether it or its uses are moral. The way of technological development is frequently immoral, upending — again — the traditional moral concept of double effect. Researchers aim to do something horrible (killing more people easier and faster), but their actions have the unintended effect of making our lives easier with gizmos originally developed as parts of a killing-tech system. The side effects are good, while the intended ones are not.

Or, are they good indeed? Another interesting element of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee story is that his character, like most of his contemporaries, when transported to another age has no problems performing the stuff of daily life: riding a horse, making fire, hunting, or cooking. On the other hand, a regular guy from our hyper-technological times would be like a baby at any other moment in history, unable to do what all men had always had to do to live.

The side effects of killing tech that make our lives easier also made it possible for a vast percentage of the population (at least in the richest countries) to arrest their personal development to the point of becoming obese porn-addicted full-time videogame players. Youngsters who could and should be working, loving, learning, praying, in short becoming good men, make themselves less than men now. Tech, non-killing tech, is the instrument of their self-destruction.

In a way, as I always say, complaints should be brought to Adam and Eve at counter #1: it’s human nature. But the vagaries of surviving have always prevented men from falling so low, except for a few of the rich and noble. Herod comes to mind; both of them, in fact. Non-killing tech, the side-effect of the murderous one, has made it possible to have a whole generation of Herods, enslaved to their lowest urges. Tech, again, is amoral. But men are not: we have a very strong bias toward what hurts us, what denies the best of our very nature. Just as a crossbow makes it easier to murder from a distance, the aggregate of widespread modern-day tech makes it possible to become a sorry excuse for a human being, perpetually scrolling and swiping pornography in the impossible quest for the ultimate orgasmic thrill. Sex that does not engender life, food that does not nourish, and virtual challenges that do not make us better: the immoral fruits of the combination of amoral tech and immoral man.

The same immorality is at the core of Modernity and is the most important element in the way all those escapist novels show the interaction of Moderns and “natives”. Tech — killing tech and technological knowledge — make Moderns “superior”, and thus they start as the equals of kings and noblemen. In the few cases where the authors remembered that rulers had their hands tied by Religion, the Moderns will help rid them of those troublesome priests. Being superior, the Moderns spread and rule, bringing together with their murderous technology their artificial ordering of human society.

Of course, it is just the wet dream of Pride; killing better and faster would be shameful everywhen but in Modern times.