The Connecticut Yankee Is Dead

Peter L. Edman

Long Live the Connecticut Yankee . . .

One of the reasons The Trinity Forum holds events as well as producing materials to read, is that conversations about a text bring out much richness that would otherwise lie dormant, as well as new ideas we might not otherwise consider. Case in point is a forum I attended in Dallas at the beginning of April. We covered our new Children of Prometheus curriculum, and Chris, one of the participants, brought up a resource we hadn’t considered for inclusion: Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (first published 1889; an Amazon listing). He brought it up to remind the group of an idea, which our curriculum is designed in part to address, that our current state of technology is dependent on much that we do not understand.

As I skimmed over the book later, I realized that it also highlights a theme that our curriculum already does cover, the interaction between human nature and human technology and the fact that, of the two, only our technology really changes in any meaningful way. As I read, several other books that Dan Russ and I used came back to my mind. Talking about them will both give you a taste for the Prometheus curriculum, help explain why we compiled it, and introduce you to some other resources that deserve your attention.

The Yankee Divide

As you may remember, Twain’s protagonist is thrown back into the early Middle Ages and is able, with typical Yankee ingenuity, to recreate over a short period of time the technology of his day—the 1880s—including the telegraph. At our forum, Chris commented that this would not be so plausible for a protagonist from today’s America due to the drastic advances since Twain’s time.

Not only that, we are separated from the 1800s by a deep cultural chasm. Considered in relation to our technology, most of us are more users than creators. Our creative energies are usually dedicated to higher-level pursuits than creating or understanding what we now consider tools. By and large we make no effort to understand our tools, and for good reason: we generally have no need to. The toolmakers provide us with carefully designed interfaces that hide the complexities from us. Even where we do understand a part of our technology, no single individual could ever replicate the complex systems and generations of tools-that-have-made-tools on which our technologies depend. Think of the iPod.

Even technical specialists increasingly do not understand other specialists, let alone other disciplines. I estimate myself to be in the top 5 percent of the world in competency in using and understanding computers, but I am constrained to the software end. I cannot repair a shorted-out circuit board in my computer, let alone my car’s transmission or my house’s heating system. Chris said that he recently made his own effort to fight this trend by rewiring his house, but it’s plain to see that the thought of an average person—even an average engineer—being able in a few years to recreate current technological civilization is laughable. A significant portion of my knowledge would become useless if disconnected from Internet and power grid. The Connecticut Yankee is dead. One might argue that the most important gap at present is not so much one between rich and poor but between those who understand technology and those who do not.

And that makes for a point worth pondering, for as Wendell Berry says in his important recent book, Life is a Miracle, “The use of science by or upon people who do not understand it is always potentially tyrannical, and it is always dangerous.”

Chris’s comment, as I said, made me go back and read through portions of the novel as a potential addition to the curriculum. I soon realized that while I knew the basic plot by cultural osmosis, I had apparently only read it in a highly abridged “Children’s Illustrated Classics” edition when I was ten. Reading through the real thing, I am struck by how Hank Morgan, Twain’s protagonist, serves, intentionally or not, to illustrate Berry’s point. It’s horrifying to read of the contempt with which Morgan, a pillar of the Enlightenment, views the people of Arthur’s court—and of the high-handed way he imposes “civilization” on the society. And of course, the first thing he does is take over the country, setting himself up as “the Boss,” chief advisor to King Arthur:

I made up my mind to two things: if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics and couldn't get away, I would presently boss that asylum or know the reason why; and if, on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all right, I didn't want any softer thing: I would boss the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years and upward. (Chapter 2)

On one level, reading this in an age where a significant portion of the elites of the West are hardly willing to say anything good about their civilization, there is something almost refreshing about Morgan’s hubris and self-confidence. He embodies the naïve modernist drive to “improve” humanity by technology. At the same time, Twain is enough of a student of human nature (to put it mildly) to show us how unrealistic such dreams are. Our problems lie not so much in our technology as ourselves. The promises of technology and technologists are often overblown or have side-effects so serious as to make net human progress questionable. When the underlying culture is not respected, the result of such meddling—in the novel, and even more so in the twentieth century—is sheer carnage.

Technopoly’s Priests

I would not be surprised to find that Twain’s novel—itself an early example of what would later become science fiction and possibly the earliest instance of a time travel novel—inspired Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law of Technology, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Yet it’s funny how little we talk about what seems to me to be an obvious ethical corollary of Clarke’s dictum: If a technology is indistinguishable from magic, its practitioners will be tempted to act like magicians. Unless someone else claims it, we’ll call it Edman’s Anthropological Extension, or to put credit where due, Twain’s Technological Truism.

It is something of a truism now, but it still needs to be stated: Technology is totalizing. Given the opportunity, technology and science expand beyond their proper competencies. They attempt to apply their techniques to humanity itself—to anthropology and sociology, certainly, but also to faith and philosophy. The opportunity is granted when faith and ethics cede the ground, as by and large they did after the Enlightenment. When morality goes away, power fills the vacuum, as Nietzsche showed, and technology is nothing if it isn’t about power and control.

In such situations, technology sets new parameters on “ought” and “should,” “good” and “bad,” making for a world where the only “bad” is a lack of technology. (I may need to formally state here the disclaimer that seems mandated for anyone who pursues this sort of discussion about technology: I am no Luddite.) But who is in control when human life as we know it cannot continue without electricity, or when teachers start preparing students for “the test”—to beat “the system”—rather than teaching them the knowledge they need to become responsible human beings? This is what the late teacher and media analyst Neil Postman, in chapter nine of Technopoly, calls scientism.

When a society allows science to become its standard for morality, the scientific and technological elite become the new priestly class. They define orthodoxy and they enforce it. Like Morgan, they tell politicians and the ignorant masses what to do. They accrue power—moral authority—grounded in the absolutes of the scientific method. The Connecticut Yankee is dead; long live the (new and improved!) Connecticut Yankee.

But power still corrupts. Today’s magician-priests are every bit as dogmatic and repressive as the stereotypical medieval Inquisitor—perhaps even more so for having so much more power. Many are as dismissive of the common culture as Morgan is of the denizens of Camelot. Bracket the question of truth and listen carefully to the tone of some of the current debates—cloning, intelligent design, global warming. Rather than the quiet confidence one might expect from those who have knowledge, I hear appeals to fear. I hear arguments from authority far more tenuous than any purportedly made by a caricatured medieval scholastic—not to mention an increasing reliance on “argument” by mere assertion. I hear ad hominem attacks. Sometimes even physical attacks. Pause for a moment and consider the sad case of Larry Summers, formerly President of Harvard, who ran afoul of the social scientists.

Too often the tone in all these debates comes down to an implicit (sometimes explicit)—How dare you question us? How dare you impugn our findings—or, in some cases, our feelings—or suggest that other agendas are more urgent? Don’t ask questions. We know what is best for you and we will tell you what you are allowed to believe. Act now or the world will come to an end!

I hear echoes of the Wizard of Oz. Don’t look behind that curtain! I hear, in fact, bravado and brittleness. This is the tone taken by people who hold power under false pretenses. Like the Communists—like Islamist radicals, in fact—they dare not tolerate dissent. But why is that?

Berry and Language

I said that Berry’s book, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, is important. This is because it is the first of the several books of his that I have read (and I have many to go) which offers not only a fresh articulation of a problem but also some tangible sense of a way forward. First, his assessment, which is certainly in line with that of Postman and many others:

This religification and evangelizing of science, in defiance of scientific principles, is now commonplace and is widely accepted or tolerated by people who are not scientists. We really seem to have conceded to scientists, to the extent of their own regrettable willingness to occupy it, the place once occupied by the prophets and priests of religion. This can have happened only because of a general abdication of our responsibility to be critical and, above all, self-critical.

Berry explains the brittleness of the new techno-priests. It lies in their embrace of scientism, which is reductionistic, pretending that because it can understand some things, it can understand everything. Science deals in definite and reproducible findings (and rightly so, in areas like physics and chemistry and biology), but when it becomes scientism it creates a climate where such “hard” facts are the only truth; statistics and standardized tests are thus good, and subjectivity, ambiguity, and individualism are bad. This is, as his subtitle indicates, a modern form of superstition. We are not so advanced as we like to think. Scientism leads to treating people and the earth as mere machines and ignoring their true complexity, their mystery:

For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever “model” we use) is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale.

His response involves a call for us to return to true humanity, which includes a “return to our cultural landmarks,” like Shakespeare, and particularly a return to a view of life as a gift, not as something we must (or even can, fully) control, let alone understand. It involves learning to live within our limits, to act responsibly and humbly within the ignorance that is imposed on us by the mystery of our very nature (one thinks here of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos). It involves a change of standards and goals, for our very limitations are something to be celebrated—they are part of the “miracle” of the book’s title.

This is a hard thing to articulate, particularly because, as Berry argues, one of the signal problems of our time is that of language. He calls us to a different language than the technical and mechanical one we have been using, where truth is reduced to fact and proof. Life, he says, is about experience.

Berry also calls us to abandon the hubristic equation of technology with progress and for technologists to begin exercising real humility and reasserting responsibility for their creations. “Applying knowledge—scientific or otherwise,” he continues, “is an art.”

An art. But we don’t teach art in engineering or business school these days. Well, perhaps, says Berry, along with many others, we should. The balkanization of the universities into isolated, battling academic disciplines is a profoundly dehumanizing thing. One of the ways to respond to the dangers of technopoly, of the magician-priests, is—oddly enough—by focusing again on the humanities, by moving toward an overarching purpose for all the disciplines, by fostering more conversations across the borders, by training whole people rather than mere workers or mere consumers or mere statistics.

It’s interesting, in this context, that the earliest Christians called themselves followers of the Way. Christians in the modernist age have emphasized Jesus as Truth, but if Berry is correct—and he is—then reminding ourselves that Jesus is the Way, that he is himself the experience of Truth, may be a useful corrective as we search for and live out the path that will lead us to full humanity.

Fact and Truth

Language, art, experience, technology, conversation across disciplines. Let me try to pull this together by discussing a book I read this spring, Shaming the Devil, by Wheaton College literature professor Alan Jacobs. The subtitle of the book is “Essays in Truthtelling,” and Jacobs does a truly masterful job of helping us think through what truth is all about, in ways that are closer to Berry’s understanding of experience and miracle than mere scientific, rationalist, reductionist, dusty facts, important as those can be. He helps to demonstrate the humanizing side of the humanities, particularly in a technological setting like our own.

Jacobs can do this in large part because he has the extremely rare ability, which I still retain hopes of developing for myself, to recognize the virtues in an argument, even a flawed argument. There is something essentially Christian, something redemptive, about this—an ability to recognize the spark of the creator in the most unlikely or disobedient of his creatures, and to be willing to listen and learn from it. He demonstrates a skill we all need to learn, an ability to appreciate while disagreeing, to respect while gently correcting. It is, in fact, the opposite approach from Twain’s hero. And it is the antithesis of the brittleness of the modern technopoly.

Shaming the Devil is an adult book—in the very best sense of “grown up”—modeling for its readers a mature and faithful way of thinking. It is also (incidental to its argument) one of the better apologies I have come across for a distinctively Christian higher education, if only for the ability to study in a community that might foster such an approach. Jacobs approaches his field in a way that sheds light both on it and on other disciplines. In language that is nearly as clear and elegant as Wendell Berry’s, he reminds us of what a grounding in literature—the images and vocabulary of stories, poetry, and essays—can do for the development of the moral imagination.

Shaming the Devil is thus a model for a different, more reflective engagement with technology, a movement away from the hyper-specialization of the recent past toward a more unified, humane treatment. After the two initial sections of the book, consisting respectively of essays on truth seekers (like his excellent piece on W. H. Auden) and truth-resisters (like, perhaps surprisingly, Iris Murdoch), Jacobs tries his hand at an “experiment,” three essays on “Computer Control (the virtues of resistance).”

He tells the story of his struggles to understand the technology he uses, particularly computer technology, and considers the way this technology helps or hinders the pursuit of truth. Shortly into his opening discussion of the benefits of a computer music program that promises to liberate the user from the limitations of their lack of musical skill, Jacobs comments,

. . . it is my habit, whenever I hear someone proclaim that they have achieved my liberation from anything, to make sure my wallet is still in my back pocket. Precisely what sort of liberation is this?

This is the sort of question that in our day needs to be asked much more than it is. It is the beginning of a humane resistance to technology’s robotic march for marching’s sake. Jacobs comments on how computer technology allows us, through the metaphors it uses, to deceive ourselves about what is really going on. I am reminded of a favorite lecture by technology writer Danah Boyd where she argues that because of the social ineptness of the average computer programmer, much of today’s computer technology requires users to act as if we were autistic. Ironically, if you are reading this essay online, and if you clicked on the link in the previous sentence, you would immediately lose my train of thought because Boyd’s transcript would either replace or overshadow mine—a point that Jacobs makes on his way to an interesting further question. We get excited about technology, he says, but our reasoning often seems to be shaped by forces outside our immediate awareness:

I am somewhat troubled by what appears to be a matching of ends to the available means: we become excited about doing whatever our technology is able to do; if its architecture enabled other actions, would the pursuit of those actions automatically become our new goal?

Part of his conclusion is that our “liberation” is under the control of the people who design the computers and other tools that we use. When we do not understand them, we are at the mercy of people whose intentions and intelligence are not known to us. Or maybe, if Danah Boyd is correct, they are, and disturbingly so.

In the second essay, Jacobs tells us of his descent (or ascent, perhaps) into the world of computer operating systems, notably Linux. It is a nice layman’s guide to the joys and horrors, the benefits and tradeoffs, of that technology, and it was inspired by the novels and essays of Neal Stephenson, who revealed to him his own ignorance—and the complexity of the system.

And this is where we came in. For nobody really understands the whole system, and the question of who is really in control is thus fraught with interest. Jacobs brings us back to a point Berry makes. The problem, as it were, is that no one is really in control, for life is not, at its essence, about control—not even in the field of technology. The problem of control has no simple answer. Considered realistically, our necessary response involves, again, humility, responsibility, and a willingness to understand our own limitations as individuals and as a species.

In his third essay in the series, Jacobs turns to the problem of language and truth and the role of faith. It is an argument against further reductionism that is worth reading and really should not itself be reduced to a summary. But there is more to knowledge than what is on the Internet. There are other virtues than efficiency. And there is value in our limitations as human beings—as created, material creatures. Making things too easy for us, as technology can do, may be ultimately dehumanizing. Jacobs’ discussion of the virtues of resistance—of asking why, of respecting limits—is something I want to live with and ponder for a good while longer.

If you want to get a feel for some of what we have tried to accomplish with our Children of Prometheus curriculum, Jacobs’ essays will help.

On one level I suppose we can be grateful for the increasing specialization of our society. With competing groups of magicians, power can be diffused somewhat. We can watch interests balance each other on freedom versus control. But we continue in serious danger of tyranny unless and until we have technologists—and politicians and business leaders and everyday citizens—committed to subordinating technology to human ends, to respecting human limits, and to promoting a humane and humanizing culture.  

Peter L. Edman is director of research at the Trinity Forum. He was born in Connecticut, home of the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant. Illustration by Timoni Grone for the Trinity Forum.

Features, Character and Ethics, Science and Technology, Wed 17 May 2006