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The Virgin and The Dynamo Revisited: An Essay on the Symbolism of Technology

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.100.1.0001

2161-6302

Harvey Cox,

Research, Science, and Academia

We need you again, Henry Adams. Are you too far gone to hear? Once you touched us with your strange ability to sharpen the elusive contours of blurred old symbols. Who can ever forget his first wide-eyed tour through Mont St. Michel and Chartres with you as his slightly eccentric guide? Thank you for all that. But now we need you again.Remember another visit you made? Your visit in 1900 to the Great Exposition, with its famous forty-foot dynamo? What a colossus it was, and what an unwilling gasp it pulled out of you, what an imprint it etched on your fragile psyche! You became fascinated, in fact almost obsessed with the giant dynamo, Henry. Of course, at another level of your consciousness you were already mulling over your book on Mont St. Michel and Chartres. It appeared a few years later, brimming with antiphons to the spiritual power of the Virgin, the power, you said, that had built Chartres. With all that seething in your subconscious, your meeting with the sleek soaring dynamo became a kind of apparition. Why, you wondered, was the Virgin gone? Where was her softness and warmth, where the, at best only partially sublimated, erotic magnetism she exuded? “To Adams,” you wrote, referring to yourself as always in the third person, “the dynamo became a symbol of infinity … he began to feel the forty foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. Before the end, one began to pray to it” (The Education of Henry Adams, Mod. Lib. Ed., p. 380).Technology as symbol: Since the days of Henry Adams few historians, even fewer sociologists, have delved into this enticing field. Yet we need the sensibility of a Henry Adams today to understand ourselves. If he was that prescient about the dynamo, what could he have told us about those throngs of hushed pilgrims gathered around the blistered American space capsule at Expo 67? Why that air of reverence? What could he have told us about our feelings toward our automobiles (family escutcheons?), the hydrogen bomb (apocalypse?), the computer (Delphian oracle?)? To understand ourselves and our technologies today we need an Adamsian fusion of Yankee shrewdness and gothic fantasy.This is not to say that the symbolic meaning of technology has gone wholly unexplored in our time. Journalists, poets, and social critics thread their way into the labyrinth periodically and return to tell us something about the machine-as-god theme. But theologians and social scientists, by and large, have steered clear of the inquiry, no doubt for very different reasons. For the sociologists it has probably been the acknowledged inadequacy of properly precise conceptual tools that has prevented the inquiry. For theologians, on the other hand, whose methods might at first appear to be more serviceable in scrutinizing the death and birth of deities, one suspects it was the odor of heresy that discouraged investigation. Also perhaps the theological and symbolic significance of technology seemed, to practitioners in both fields, at best remote from the main issues, at worst a trivial or even distracting consideration.Henry Adams would never have agreed that the symbolic analysis of technology was trivial. He believed that about the year 1600, the year of the burning of Giordano Bruno, Western civilization had gone through an epochal transition. It was a sea change from what Adams called the “religious” to what he called the “mechanical” age. Adams described this transition in terms of “energy,” a popular if somewhat loosely used word in his day. In our terms he was talking about how a culture orders and symbolizes its meanings and aspirations, how it sanctifies its values and celebrates its hopes. Adams saw, in short, what so many commentators on technology since then have missed. He saw that the dynamo (read jet plane, computer, automobile, nuclear accelerator) was not only a forty-foot tool man could use to help him on his way; it was also a forty-foot-high symbol of where he wanted to go.In the spirit of Henry Adams I would like to ask again about the symbolic significance of technology. In so doing my modest hope is to bring into fuller consciousness some current cultural attitudes toward technology, to ask about the possible import of these attitudes and then to register a few implications for future work.The great mythological themes continue to repeat themselves in the obscure depths of the psyche…. It seems that a myth itself, as well as the symbols it brings into play, never quite disappears from the present world of the psyche; it only changes its aspect and disguises its operation.—mircea eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries What is the dynamo? It is the power source of technology. By “technology” I mean the tools and procedures, in their nearly infinite variety, that men utilize to observe, cope with and modify their environment. I realize that even this simple definition is not likely to escape dispute. By using it I am quite consciously rejecting the kind of definition advanced, for example, by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society. “Technique,” says Ellul, “is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity” (p. xxv; italics are Ellul's). I regard this definition as at once too sweeping and too imprecise. Also I do not think it is particularly clear. Some definitions of technology are too narrow, identifying the term wholly with “the machine.” Others, including I fear Ellul's (and perhaps Lewis Mumford's) are too inclusive and therefore render precision, hard enough to attain in this murky field, even harder. I also understand that by “technique” Ellul appears to mean something different from “technology,” although his English-reading supporters rarely make the distinction. In any case, I am trying here to avoid making “technology” mean either too little or too much. I want to stay fairly close to an ordinary-speech meaning.“Symbol” is also not easy to define. Symbols, as I understand them, facilitate, perhaps even make possible cognitive experience. All cognition and communication presuppose social existence, and social existence is made possible through mutually appreciated words and gestures. Symbol thus suggests the intrinsic sociability of human existence. Symbol is the medium of one self's participation in the selfhood of others. Symbols must, by their very nature, be shared. Even dream symbols, as Freud pointed out, have a public side. Thus a symbol can be anything (a word, object, person, gesture, etc.) that has a certain common significance and that helps to order or make sense out of raw experience.Now putting together the definitions of the two key terms becomes possible. By the “symbolism of technology” I have in mind those meanings technologies have above and beyond their merely technical function. Technological artifacts become symbols when they are “iconized,” when they release emotions incommensurate with their mere utility, when they arouse hopes and fears only indirectly related to their use, when they begin to provide elements for the mapping of cognitive experience. The dynamo becomes a symbol when it begins to designate the self-understanding of a people or of an epoch, when it is placed on view at an exposition, when, as Adams said, one begins to pray to it.High from the central cupola, they say One's glance could cross the borders of three states; But I have seen death's stare in slow survey from four horizons that no one relates.—hart crane, The Bridge If Henry Adams' insight was correct it means that in the past two centuries or more certain technologies have begun to acquire an aura that is not only symbolic but religious. The dynamos and their assorted metallic kinsmen have stolen fire from the saints and virgins. But to support this assertion it is necessary first to make clear what a “religious symbol” is, and then to show how certain technologies have begun to acquire sacred significance.In a classic passage, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim describes what he calls “the ambiguity of the notion of sacredness.” He argues that religious phenomena are of two contradictory sorts. Some are beneficent, dispersers of life and health; others are evil and impure, the sources of disorder, disease, and death. The good ones elicit feelings of love and gratitude, the evil call forth attitudes of fear and horror. The two sentiments, although both are “sacred,” are very far apart, and are often separated from each other by rigid ritual rules. “Thus the whole religious life gravitates about two contrary poles,” Durkheim declares, “between which there is the same opposition as between the pure and the impure, the saint and the sacrilegious, the divine and the diabolic” (p. 456).But then Durkheim goes on to make a masterful observation, one that is borne out by the study of any religious system. He shows that while these two contrasting attitudes seem at first disparate and even contradictory, in practice there is a close kinship between them. Both positive and the negative are sacred as opposed to profane. In more recent terms, both have a highly charged, symbolic character rather than a merely instrumental one. As Durkheim says, There is a horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense, while the fear inspired by malign powers is generally not without a certain reverential character. (p. 456) For Durkheim the shades by which these two attitudes are differentiated are so slight that sometimes it is not possible to distinguish one from the other. In fact, an impure thing or evil power often becomes, through a simple modification of circumstances, a source of healthful power and goodness. “So the pure and the impure,” concludes Durkheim, “are not two separate classes, but two varieties of the same class.” This “class” includes all sacred things.Later on Durkheim hints at but never really makes explicit still another facet in “the ambiguity of the sacred.” He suggests that it is precisely the most powerful symbols that exhibit the most ambiguity. Lower-level symbols can more easily be classified as simply positive or simply negative. High-order, very potent and more universally recognized symbols, on the other hand, exhibit a much more ambiguous character. The local patron saint can help us with special problems. Almighty God, however, can grant us eternal bliss or cast us into the lake of fire.Durkheim's thesis about the ambiguity of the sacred is confirmed by other scholars. Malinowski, for example, in his famous studies of the Trobriand Islanders, shows that a dead man is viewed with horror and fear, but that ingesting part of his flesh is also the source of incomparably potent health-giving and tribe-sustaining energy. In Hindu iconography, important sacred figures are often depicted with more than one head so that the malevolent and the beneficent aspects can clearly be shown as belonging to the same divinity. The Christian cross is not only the “emblem of suffering and shame”; it is also the assurance of God's love for man and life's victory over death. Wherever symbols reach a degree of intensity and power that could be called “religious” (and the borderline is always fuzzy), the devil turns out to be a fallen angel.Symbols of the sacred, then, are characterized by a high degree of power and of ambiguity. They arouse dread and gratitude, terror and rapture. The more central and powerful a symbol is for a culture the more vivid the ambiguity becomes. A symbol becomes religious or sacred when it reaches such a degree of priority or ultimacy that it begins to sanctify other values, symbols, and meaning definitions. This is an important point: a “religious symbol” is defined not by its content but by its relative degree of cultural power.Naturally, this definition could easily be criticized by those who would like to restrict the term “religious” or “sacred” to symbols presently accepted by recognized “religious institutions” such as churches. This could of course be done. The disadvantage is that it turns over to the society's presently recognized religious institutions the rather considerable power to decide what is and what is not religious. Such an abdication not only restricts investigation unduly; it also systematically prevents us from noting the appearance of new religious symbols and practices not as yet blessed with ecclesiastical legitimation. Churches notoriously try to prevent religious change by declaring what is and is not religion, or “true religion.” We need a wider scope. I believe my definition does this without making quite the whole world its parish. Clearly there is nothing to prevent technologies of any kind from functioning as sacred symbols in Durkheim's sense. Our question now is whether this is in fact happening.In his book Symbolism of Evil the French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur lists two principal axes on which religious symbolism develops. The first is that of bondage and extrication. The second is defilement and purification. Both Ricoeur's axes suggest dynamic symbols and are consequently classifiable as “rituals.” There is another category of religious symbols, however. It includes those that provide the material for “placing” man and his society in a larger network of meanings. These I would call “myths.”The case that some technologies are beginning to function as sacred symbols could be made with respect to both rituals and myths. Take the ritual of defilement and purification, for example. Who could deny the enormous interest in sterilization, purification, and cleansing that characterizes our society today? We have developed almost laughably refined technologies—sanitary, medical, prophylactic—to aid us in our self-purification. Our fascination with detergents alone is amply demonstrated by any evening's fare of television advertising. We also know, however, that obsessive cleanliness reveals a deeper-stated anxiety (“Out, damned spot …”) and that our technologies have also become symbols of defilement. The billowing smoke stack, the auto graveyard, the oil slick—all have turned into icons of pollution. But the irony is delicious. The very detergents we churn out to cleanse us end up defiling our lakes. Vishnu is also Shiva. Can we say anything more precise about our technological rituals and myths?Then the Lord said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him. Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still,Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain.—exodus, ix, 1–3 Evidence is accumulating that many people in industrial-bureaucratic societies today experience themselves as trapped, powerless, and immobilized. Ordinary speech abounds with phrases like “stuck,” “hung-up,” “rat-race,” and “dead-end” to describe work, marriage, and everyday life. The theme also appears in artistic creations. In a play ironically entitled Happy Days, by the Nobel Prize winning playwright Samuel Beckett, both characters sit mired uncomfortably in piles of sand up to their waists. As the play proceeds, each act finds them more deeply buried in the sand until, in the final act, only their heads remain visible. The same writer ends his play Waiting for Godot by having Estragon say to Vladimir, “Let's go,” and Vladimir answering, “O.K. Let's go.” The stage directions then read, “They do not move. Curtain.” In the same playwright's Endgame the characters peer out of garbage cans.Themes of immobility and miredness are not new in contemporary cultural expressions. Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit is a classic statement. Luis Bufiel's film The Exterminating Angel depicts a group of people who for some eerie reason seem unable to get out of the salon where they are having a party. The American sociologist Ernest Becker discusses the striking frequency of such images in his book of essays Angel in Armour and attributes it in part to the perception, felt by large numbers of people, that they are totally incapable of influencing the vast and baffling social institutions they live in.Whatever the historical circumstances that induce in a society a consciousness of bondage, symbols of bondage recur constantly in the history of religion. One can be a prisoner in his own body, as Socrates describes himself in The Apology, or a slave of the great Wheel of Fate, or chained to a rock in the Caucasus, or a captive in Hell or possessed by demons or in slavery or entombed. Whatever the symbolism, powerlessness means the inability either to get out or to exert significant influence over one's own destiny.The symbolic solutions offered to this crisis are of four major types: First, one can escape the bondage oneself by exerting enough energy of guilt: Operation Bootstrap. Second, one can learn to accept the enslavement and live with it with dignity: resignation. Third, one can be extricated from it by a power greater than oneself. Fourth, one can cooperate with powers greater than oneself to struggle against and eventually defeat the conditions imposing bondage. Escape, resignation, extrication, and struggle are the four major alternative solutions to the curse of confinement. It should be added that each of these four possibilities can occur either individually or corporately. One pervasive theme in the traditional stories of the great religious “founders” is that they refuse to be satisfied with individual escape or extrication. They all “return” either to teach others the solution they have found (the Buddha) or to lead captives into some form of liberation (Moses).One important symbolic meaning of technology for numberless people today, especially in the U.S.A., is that of extrication. Techno-power becomes the deus ex machina which lifts us out of our immobilized condition and thereby delivers us from bondage. To demonstrate this symbolic use of technology fully would require more space than is available here. I prefer rather to be satisfied with suggesting this pattern with two examples, one rather commonplace, one somewhat bizarre. The first is the way jet tourist travel is increasingly sold with images of “escape” (meaning really extrication). The second is the infant (pseudo?) technology of cryonics, the quick-freezing of human beings for possible resuscitation later, when cures for the diseases they have died of will presumably have been discovered.The high white contrails of cruising jets are bright symbols of the promise and pleasure of air travel.—time, January 19, 1970 Peruse the secular iconography of the travel pages of any large newspaper. Invariably it features a juxtaposition of bikini-clad women and jet airplanes. This is not really surprising. Marshall McLuhan told us years ago that our culture's most commanding symbol is a “mechanical bride.” When virgins wrestle with dynamos, curious hybrids can be expected to appear. The majority of the night dreams of people in industrial societies center on themes of sex and violence, or so clinicians tell us. These dreams reflect, they say, our hunger for community and power. The admixture of woman and jet plane conjures both feeling-clusters at once. The scantily-clad girl smiling invitingly at poolside tells us we are loved, welcomed, nurtured—delivered from isolation and frustration. The soaring jet plane tells us it is all within our grasp. Technology extricates us, as the Air France ad proclaims, “from the ordinary.” The airlines' omnipotent wings bear us aloft to an Elysium where, in contrast to our daily experience, the ad assures us, we can either be “deeply involved” or “left alone.”The theme of deliverance from the woes of this ordinary world to an extraordinary world, albeit even temporarily, through the powerful intervention of a benevolent savior is an old one. Some shamans describe the trance experience as one of feeling picked up and borne away to the magic land by a huge bird. Of course the woes from which one is delivered vary to some extent from culture to culture. Philip Slater in The Pursuit of Loneliness (Beacon Press, 1970) shows how Americans today seem to feel frustrated by our conflicting quests, at one and the same time, for both privacy and community. We produce technologies designed to insulate us from human contact (cars taking the place of trains, self-service devices). Insulated, we then begin to miss human relations. But when other persons do touch our lives, the experience seems intrusive, competitive, irksome, or otherwise unpleasant. It is a vicious circle. We are on a pilgrimage in quest of both deeper involvement and more privacy. No wonder then that one travel ad assures us that on the sun-drenched enchanted island to which the huge bird will carry us one can have “all the involvement you want” or “none at all.” The text of a recent Air France advertisement in the Sunday New York Times (February 8, 1970) includes the following: Escape Your World. Embrace Ours.Abandon the Ordinary. Fly with us to our exciting European resort-villages. Where Internationals play. And total involvement is up to you.Join Escape Unlimited. Let yourself go. Embrace the uninhibited. Escape to any of three private and privileged resort villages in the azure Mediterranean…. Now a limited number of Americans may join Escape Unlimited and savor the freedom of our continental Escape-Aways….Total Involvement is Up to You. Escape Unlimited involves you in everything … or nothing. The ad goes on to promise companionship with “fellow bons amis” who are “lovers of the free and uninhibited life” and “young in spirit” (if not always, I suppose, in chronology). The key words are “involvement,” “escape,” “experience,” “freedom,” “excitement.” The picture shows a generously endowed woman frisking in the surf with a less clearly seen man. Both appear young in years as well as in spirit. The sexual overtones of the word “involvement” are underlined by the pictures, the insulation from intrusion is guaranteed by the island's isolation. Whereas in this vale of tears we lurch between deep loneliness and bothersome interruptions, there we will experience both perfect community and perfect privacy. No revivalist hymn ever promised more. Sweet Beulah Land!The link between our hungry search for authentic community and the extraordinary hopes we pin on technology deserves further exploration. The big bird is still swooping to save us in our need. But beware! When we concentrate hopes so heavily, if the cure fails, the disappointment, anger, and scapegoating of the false savior sours into righteous rage. The automobile, which promised to give us privacy and mobility, freedom and community (or so we hoped), turned on us. So now it becomes the object of that peculiar kind of hatred felt by a lover abandoned or, worse still, a devotee betrayed. A group of college students, enacting a rite Henry Adams would have savored, recently dug a grave and buried an automobile. But they were really missing the point. Even a universal auto da fé of all our cars and jets would not really get at the heart of our malady. Our real sickness is within. It is our inability (related, I think, to our compulsive acquisitiveness and consequent fear of others) to fashion a more human form of community.No one can escape from the machine. Only the machine can enable you to escape from destiny.—tristan tzara “The last enemy,” St. Paul says, “is death.” Although the fear of death and punishment after death does not haunt twentieth-century man as it did his medieval forebears, it still lingers in the recesses of the modern imagination. We fear death today not because dying entails physical pain—thanks to medical technology that can be dulled. Nor do we fear hell fire. Rather we fear death because it removes us from the human community. When we say that perpetual solitary confinement would be “worse than death” what we mean, I suppose, is that in both conditions we are deprived of human relationships, but that in death we are at least unaware of the deprivation.All this is what makes the alleged science of “cryonics” so interesting, if admittedly in a somewhat ghoulish way. If death is the last enemy, then cryonics is surely the ultimate “technological fix.” The theory is simple enough. Immediately after death, the body is frozen in a chemical solution to await the future discovery of cures for whatever caused the patient's demise. “Cryonics” comes from the Greek word for frost, kryos. Cryonics societies meet in New York and in California. The small journal of the movement, begun in 1966 as Cryonics Reports, was rechristened in 1970 and is now called simply Immortality (Monthly. 9 Holmes Court, Sayville, L.I., N.Y. 11782). Several individuals are already stored in cryonic suspension awaiting the secularized last trumpet of a white-coated Gabriel in whose porcelain tureens, presumably, the first antidote to angina pectoris has just sprouted.Alas, it is far too easy to hold up the cryonics crowd to ridicule, as I am even now tempted to do. Their argument is sensible enough. Organismal death (unconsciousness due to heart and lung stoppage) often precedes psychic death (destruction of cerebral cortex cells through lack of oxygen). Animals have been suspended after organismal death and returned to normal. Nor are the questions of cost of maintenance and the eventual ratio of caretakers to cryonically suspended souls in their liquid helium purgatory the really significant ones. Not even the seemingly overwhelming problem of finding space for all the bodies should detain us. One Robert Schimel, identified in Cryonics Report for December, 1969 as “an experimental designer … employed as an instructor at Kent State University,” has drawn up plans for a storage facility on the moon that would accommodate 1,437,969 patients. He calls it a “cryosanctorum.” (The primitive religious parallels to Mr. Schimel's scheme, the belief that the spirits of the dead go to some nearby relatively inaccessible place and return when appropriate conditions are ripe—I think especially of Malinowski's work on the “baloma”—are tempting to describe here but I will resist.) Once death is defined as a problem for which there is a technological solution, then there is always at least a theoretical answer to every bug in the system.But I do not intend merely to dispose of the cryonics people with a laugh. The laugh can often be a way of avoiding deep-seated and threatening issues, just as raising technical queries about cryonics is often a way to escape the philosophical questions it raises. Cryonics is interesting because it provides the clearest possible example of the refocusing of a perennial human hope (the conquest of death) from one symbolic object to another. There are obvious similarities between the two. In one of the most familiar Greek Orthodox icons, Christ is seen striking open the caskets of the dead and consigning the newly awakened corpses either to bliss or to oblivion. In medical theology, the place where the resurrected ones spend eternity depends on their comparative virtue. In Calvinism it depends entirely on God's grace. In cryonic eschatology, I suppose, virtue has nothing to do with who gets resuscitated.1The cryonics movement is not now very widely known. It may never be. The suspension theory is not even very new. The Egyptians apparently believed that their pharaohs preserved in pyramidal cryosanctorums would eventually come alive again, not just in a super-terrestrial sphere but here where they would need their bowls and dogs. Cryonics is interesting mainly as a singularly dramatic example of a problem that theologians have steadfastly avoided. If not nitrogen freezing, what about aging deterrents? If not in the next 100 years, what about the next 1000, or 10,000? The theological issues fairly swarm over the subject. Do the cryonics people realize, for example, just how Western (even Christian) their operation is? There are some religious traditions in which coming back from the dead into this world is not at all a desirable goal. Preservation of the body and the rekindling of consciousness are not hoped for at all in religious traditions that view the body as evil and consciousness as illusory. Or consider the fact that for a white male of twenty-five in the U.S.A. today, suicide is the second most probable cause of death (auto accident is first). Presumably only people who choose to do so would be frozen, and suicides would not. But should they be condemned to an eternity of oblivion for one impulsive act? Or should they be frozen and revived when the cure is found, to give them another chance? Not to give them such a second chance would seem to perpetuate the traditional Roman Catholic tradition (now almost wholly inoperable) that a suicide dies in mortal sin and goes to hell, forever.There are numerous other “religious” questions. Let me avoid them at the moment simply by hazarding my guess that if cryonics grows into a more widely practical art, the rituals and symbolic overtones attached to its equipment, practitioners, and procedures will be fascinating to watch. But (and this is my real point) the obviously symbolic-religious dimensions of cryonics differ only in degree, not in kind, from the same dimensions of other technologies.When does one begin to pray to the dynamo? Obviously certain technologies are beginning to achieve a ritual significance. They touch our fears and our fantasies at levels that lie much deeper than we usually think. They focus our hopes. They sanctify the values that guide our crucial decisions; they provide the ritual means by which a desired state may be attained.Now I turn from technology as ritual (means of grace) to technology as myth, as the symbolic definition of man's place