Jack William Bell

From the Wikipedia article for ‘techné’:

 The term is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective.

Yet another meta-mind convenience-concept of the Greeks (good for ‘thinking about thinking’), techné both describes a magnificently human behavior pattern and links it to similar patterns in a few other species. For the purposes of this essay I am going to talk about techné as ‘tool use’. However, to do so I need to first define ‘tool use’–in terms of techné.

As stated, humans are far from the only creatures to use tools to accomplish an end. Many mammals and birds, even sea creatures, use tools to get (or get to) food. Colony insects, like ants and bees, could be considered tool using; not just because they create things, but because they apply complex behavior patterns to modifying their environment. Once could say these behaviors themselves are a tool.

Yet, for using tools, techné is the application of ‘rational method’ when doing it. No one has proven insects are exhibiting more than an Emergent System, with simple rules interacting in large masses to generate deep complexity. They don’t think about what they are doing because what they are doing grows out of hardwired behaviors. You could say that Evolution did the thinking for them, except Evolution does not think.

On the other hand, crows actually think about the best way to stick a twig into an old stump and dig out a grub. They peek in the hole with one eye, clearly running through a batch of scenarios based on past experience, and then jab the twig in just so. They are applying techné. Many primates have even been known to use tools to make tools, the acme of techné.

But we humans take all this to the next level and then some. We are the only surviving species of the one known genus to ever use fire. We are also the one species using tools to make tools to make tools to make . . . [cut for length] . . . tools, until we finally have the tools to modify the environment of the entire Earth.

Even if you discount Global Warming (as some do) as non-anthropic, who could deny the impact of human technology on our planet? The evidence is all around you.

Next time you travel to a national park or other wilderness area, begin at the center of the biggest city nearby. Then, as you travel, watch the environment around you change. Starting from the concrete wasp nest of the city your view gradually softens, as the hard angles of made elements are replaced by the organic outlines of natural elements. A slow morph from streets and buildings into forest or empty desert.

True, even in the heart of the greatest city can be found some nature. but these ‘more natural’ areas like parks and farms themselves are a form of techné. Think about this: much of the Earth consists of places where some to most of the natural elements (plants and animals) are there because humans put them there and maintain them in that spot. We turned living things into tools through selective breeding.

Humans have modified the natural environment just about everywhere we have touched. Cities are the least of it. Oil wells are only a symptom. Even low-tech civilizations create harnessed ecologies, like crops and domesticated animals, and plant them into natural ecologies like a horde of demented Johnny Appleseeds.

This extends beyond the farms into otherwise unmaintained grazing land; our animals modify it by simply being there. The resulting changes are sometimes unintentionally negative–we, or rather our animal tools, can turn a working ecology into a broken one; transforming praire or veldt into desert.

Much of the remaining natural land has felt our techné as well, as we lumber and mine and pave our way across the landscape. Replanting tame trees and grasses as we go.

Even the wilderness is not free of human influence. Go to the remotest of places and you come upon some evidence of human passage or works. Try it sometime, try to find a place where you can be fairly certain no human has stood before. If you manage this feat, I suggest cleaning up after yourself and telling no one about it. That way the next poor sod to stand there can think he was the first. The way you did.

What little ‘unspoiled’ wilderness we have left is mostly there on human sufferance anyway. The Earth is our bitch.

There is this science-fictional idea called ‘Terraforming“: changing the conditions of a planet to support a tame ecology planted by humans in order to make humans comfortable there. Throughout the existence of our species, Homo Sapiens has been making the Earth into a place good for humans to live. We’ve been ‘Humanifying’ the Earth.

We’ve been very successful at this endeavor, to the point some argue we’ve been rather too successful for our own good. Others point out that living the way we do is a positive thing because it is good for us as groups and for us as individuals. (Which it generally is, at least compared to the short and difficult life of a hunter-gatherer.) Most of us don’t think about it too much, because we have enough to deal with just living our lives and operating our little piece of the specie’s techné.

Prometheus would be proud! We took his fire and changed almost an entire fucking planet, like an ant colony changing a forest. We used tools made with tools to turn the Earth itself into a tool. Unfortunately, there is growing evidence we broke it in the process.

This was bound to happen. Basically it is what humans do. What we evolved to do. And there might lie the seed of hope.

Like termites we build. Like ants we sometimes modify our surroundings too much and make a forest or a field useless. Unlike them we think about what we do. We think about the unintended side-effects of what we do. We think about reducing or removing the harm of what we do. We apply techné to the problems we create with techné. We might argue over what is the best thing to do and when is the best time to do it, but that’s another thing humans do.

We got into this with techné and only techné will get us out. Despite the ideals of a very small minority, most of us would prefer we live at least as well as we already do and hope our children live even better. This means we aren’t going to stop having children or even scale back our lifestyles until conditions we cannot control make us. (Which might happen, if the doomsayers have the right of it.) To the good, low-birth rates and higher-tech environments are correlated in humans.

So, unless you are a flat-earther who believes oil is a self-sustaining resource and all this environmental claptrap is a con job, it is time to face facts. We’ve got two choices: We can look forward to a future where the last human technical civilizations wage all-out war to control remaining energy supplies and arable land. Or we can invent our way out of the hole we dug. Probably making horrible mistakes along the way, as humans do. What we aren’t going to do is conserve well enough to reach some kind of steady-state. That is a snake-oil solution requiring us to change human nature.

Think about this while you are driving to work tomorrow.