Life Cannot Be Delegated
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 15
Welcome to the last installment of the Convivial Society for 2024. Come January, this iteration of the newsletter will celebrate its fifth year. It’s been a joy to write, and a pleasure to connect with readers over the past five years. Thank you all. In this short installment, I offer you a principle which might guide our thinking about technology in the coming year, along with a couple of year-end traditions tagged on at the end.
Cheers and happy new year,
Michael
A few weeks ago, I posted about how certain lines or quotations can function as verbal amulets that we carry with us to ward off the deleterious spirits of the age. Such words, I suggested, “might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart.”
One such line for me, which I did not include in that earlier post, comes from a rather well-known 1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.”1 Of course, to say it is “well-known” is a relative statement. I mean something like “well-known within that tiny subset of people who are interested in technology and culture and who also happen to care about what older sources might teach us about such matters.” So, you know, not “well-known” in the sense that most people would mean the phrase.
That said, the essay should be more widely read. Sixty years later, Mumford’s counsel and warnings appear all the more urgent. It is in this essay that Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics.”
Here’s how Mumford describes the bargain. Forgive the lengthy quotation, but I think it will be worth your time if you’ve not encountered it before.
The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.
There’s a lot to think about in those few lines. For my money, that paragraph, written sixty years ago, tells us more about the current state of affairs than a thousand takes we might stumble across as we browse our timelines today. There is, for instance, just below the surface of Mumford’s analysis, a profound insight into the nature of human desire in late modern societies that is worth teasing out at length, but I’ll pass on that for the time being.2
A little further on, nearing the close of the essay, Mumford tells readers that they should not mistake his meaning. “This is not a prediction of what will happen,” he clarifies, “but a warning against what may happen.” More than half a century later, I’m tempted to say that the warning has come perilously close to reality and the only question now might be what comes next.
But all of this, patient reader, is prelude to sharing the line to which I’ve been alluding.
It is this: “Life cannot be delegated.”
Simply stated. Decisive. Memorable.
Here’s a bit more of the immediate context:
“What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under-dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.”
I say it is simply stated, but it also invites clarifying questions. Chief among them might be “What exactly is meant by ‘life’?” Or, “Why exactly can it not be delegated?” And, “What counts as delegation anyway?” So let’s start there.
Whatever we take life to mean, we should immediately recognize that we are speaking qualitatively. Mumford is telling us something about an ideal form of life, not mere existence.3 Earlier, for example, he had spoken about life in its “fullness and wholeness.”
Mumford’s claim is a provocation for us to consider what might be essential to a life that is full and whole, one in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because by its very nature it requires our whole-person involvement. And by delegation, I take Mumford to mean the outsourcing of such involvement to a technological device or system, or, alternatively, the embrace of technologically mediated distraction and escapism in the place of such involvement.
I also tend to read Mumford’s claim through Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds. Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or institution counterproductive. This means that rather than declare a technology or institution either good or bad by its nature, we recognize instead the possibility that a technology or institution might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become, first, counterproductive and then eventually destructive.
So, with regard to the principle that life cannot be delegated, we might helpfully ask, “What are the thresholds of delegation beyond which what we are left with is no longer life in its fullness and wholeness?”
This seems to be an especially relevant question as we navigate the ever-widening field of technologies which invite us to delegate an increasing range of tasks, activities, roles, and responsibilities. We are told, for instance, that we are entering an age of LLM-based AI agents, which will be able to streamline our work and simplify our lives across a wide array of domains.
Perhaps. My point is not to rule out any such possibility.4 Rather, I am inviting us to critically consider at the outset where the thresholds of delegation might be for each of us. And these will, in fact, vary person to person, which is why I tend to traffic in questions rather than prescriptions. I am convinced that these are matters of practical wisdom. No one can set out a list of precise and universal rules applicable to every person under all circumstances. Indeed, the temptation to wish for such is likely a symptom of the general malaise. We must all think for ourselves, and in conversation with each other, so that we can arrive at sound judgments under our particular circumstances and given our particular aims.
The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
Perhaps we are tempted to think that care, skill, judgment, and responsibility are only of consequence when the circumstances are grave, momentous, or otherwise obviously consequential, which means that we might miss how, in fact, even our mundane everyday work might be exactly how we care, develop skill, exercise judgment, and embrace responsibility. (It occurs to me just now, that the etymology of mundane, usually given a pejorative sense in English, suggests something that is “of this world.” It is the stuff our world is made of, to take flight from the mundane is to take flight from the world.)
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know this is something I’ve sought to articulate at various points in the last few years (for example). So I’m always glad to encounter someone else trying to say the same thing and saying it well. Recently, I stumbled across this bit of wisdom from Gary Snyder6:
“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says … master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than another, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick—don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our ‘practice’ which will put us on a ‘path’—it is our path.”
I’ll conclude by offering you a complementary principle to Mumford’s: To live is to be implicated.
I take the language of implication, with its rich connotations, from Steven Garber, who writes about work and vocation from a religious perspective. Drawing on Wendell Berry and Václav Havel, Garber argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to be. In my view, Garber’s exhortation echoes Mumford’s warning but in another key. To say that life cannot be delegated is to say that life, lived consciously and well, will necessarily implicate us in the world. May we have the courage to be so implicated.
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Year’s End
It is customary for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem “Year’s End” in the last installment of the year. Enjoy.
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
For a more extensive consideration of this essay, see this excellent discussion by Zachary Loeb: “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, revisited.”
Here’s another paragraph that remains timely: “The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.”
Although I am immediately tempted to add that there is no such thing as mere existence. Existence itself is a miracle, and the recognition of this fact the beginning of wonder and thus thought.
Although I commend to you Rob Horning’s analysis: “Generative AI, [Ben] Recht argues, ‘always seems to provide the minimal effort path to a passing but shitty solution,’ which actually seems like a fairly charitable assessment. But it is obviously something that worker-users would employ when they don’t care about what they are asking for or how it is presented, for optimized producers who see research as an obstacle to understanding rather than the essence of it, for people conditioned to be absent at any presumed moment of communion. Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.”
I’m tentatively planning on following up with two additional posts on related principles: Life cannot be simulated, and life cannot be accelerated. We’ll see!
In the original post, I wrote “the late Gary Snyder,” which, as more than one attentive reader pointed out, was a grave mistake. Snyder is still with us, and I’m not sure how I got it in my head that he had passed. Snyder was the subject of a recent episode of the wonderful
. Also, I think the most recent episode with is quite pertinent to the content of this post, and well worth your time.
Gary Snyder is still alive!! Please take out that “late!”
Re your 5th footnote, I would love to read those two pieces soon!