Separating How's and Why's

I just got through rereading Matthew Arnold’s 1862 book-length essay,  Culture and Anarchy, this time fortunately in a well-edited and concise version provided by the Great Books Foundation.  It’s a wonderful gem for the ideas it contains and a tedious bore for the lengthy Victorian language in which they’re embedded.  Arnold is more generally known as a poet (he taught poetry at Oxford and his “Dover Beach” at least used to be required reading in any literature class).  But his late 19^th century democratizing reform of the English school system and his great essay properly put him on the reading list for social history courses; that was where I first encountered him. 

The culture he writes about is not the culture of paintings and music and how to dress properly for a ball, nor anthropology’s modern definition of culture as a communication system, but about the search for perfection, “seeing things as they are” and virtuous action.  He dubs the whole thing “sweetness and light” and says that is what we should be educating for, because that is what holds society together.  It is, for example, “seeing things as they are” which enables us to recognize the common traits and foibles we share with others opposed to us and completely unlike us and to work together with them.  And, like his contemporary John Stuart Mill, he believes that Liberty is meaningless unless it produces responsible action.  It is the interaction between the search for perfection and virtuous living that prevents society from descending into an “anything goes” anarchy on the one hand or an intolerable conformancy on the other.  And the greatest enemy of sweetness and light is what he calls our immersion in the “machinery” of living.  For that immersion distracts us from asking “why” and focuses us only on “how to.”  Nowadays we would call that “machinery” technology.

It all sounds very abstract and Victorian until you read the newspapers and journals and cartoons.  For example, in the Washington Post David Ignatius writes about how at NSA, intelligence specialists were so consumed with what they could do with advanced technology to collect “metadata” that they went about collecting everything, without regard to why or why not it was needed.  Meanwhile, in a Scientific American review, Craig Venter, of human genome fame, is quoted as saying he doesn’t worry about the misuse of technology, but about the possible lack of use of it.  And in a recent New Yorker cartoon, young people dressed as a wedding party are standing around in front of a priest; each of them is intently reading his/her iphone, and the bride is glancing up and saying “oh yeah, I do.”  We treat Liberty as meaning our right to carry assault rifles and to pollute our air and streams.  We don’t ask why all those rounds are needed in a city park, or why increased profit should come at the expense of dirty air.  We see “the way things are” only as meaning millions starve for the benefit of a few.

Venter is charging ahead in pursuit of “digital life”, with the goal of eventually transferring whole people to the Internet.  He thinks the whole of life is reducible to “DNA machines” and “protein robots.”  His immediate “why” is obvious: to secure a personal immortality with some fame and fortune along the way.  That’s fascinating, given that “machines” or “robots” are not generally interested in that sort of thing.  His internet should be dubbed “Venter’s Ark.”  No more worry about climate or arthritis if you are just a cloud of electrons floating about in the ether.  Of course, propagating the species after a major system crash becomes problematic, or what is foregone in the life of an electron cloud, as well as what is happening to the billions of people who are not transferred to the Internet.  Or what to do on a dreary day a million years from now.  Or why immortality is desirable in the first place.

The NSA intelligence analysts have the excuse of an overriding concern with preventing terrorism.  That bumps into a national concern with preserving privacy.  At the start of the Snowden escapade, my view of the conflicting priorities was that so long as responsible governance required use of metadata, responsible citizenship required making it available.  But the NSA scenes described by Ignatius don’t constitute responsible governance.  They depict analysts caught up in the pleasures of technical accomplishment, the “how’s”, to the point of forgetting to ask the “why’s.”  The “why” of preventing terrorism becomes an excuse for figuring out how to do an even more advanced analysis.  They’re like that wedding party with the iphones; they have no clue about why they are there in the first place, or the significance of the consequences.

I’m no Neo Luddite.  I spent a career introducing new technology, and am proud of it.  But having an answer to the “why” was always important.  I always tried to avoid solutions in search of a problem.  I’ve turned down more than one technical proposal on those grounds.  That reluctance to over employ technology just for the fun of it is what I see less and less of these days.  We’re caught on the carousel of innovation, flying faster and faster, each trying to grab a new golden ring, approaching the “anything goes” anarchy of which Arnold warned.  Meanwhile, our education systems are avoiding teaching the importance of “virtuous action” as too controversial in a multicultural society.  “Values” education is no longer a goal in our schools, and it should be.  It’s time to reclaim the tools we use to separate what’s really important from the trash.