Commonly, we presume an opposition between the “natural” and the “artificial”. Usually, we assume the “natural” to be everything untouched by human hands, whereas the “artificial” is that which we have ourselves brought into being. But this division not only ends up positing as irreconcilable the objects of our experience, it reinforces a false anthropological narrative. If we want to understand the real effects of artificial technologies on nature, we need first to understand what the “natural environment” really is—and how, then, artifice may integrate with or operate contrary to that environment.
Attaining this understanding requires that we reexamine certain presuppositions, especially concerning the reasons why we hold nature and the artificial to be opposed. It will also require us, again, to think more deeply about the nature of technology itself.
I. False Opposition of Nature and Artifice
We often talk about nature and artificial things as though they stand in simple opposition to one another. The natural is conceived as something given, and the artificial as something imposed or even created. Where nature tends to take care of itself, affecting a kind of long-term harmony and balance even amidst its short-term disasters and calamities, human artifice—especially in its form of modern technology—seems to progressively worsen, with its short-term improvements nevertheless contributing, ultimately, to long-term imbalance. Thus, increasingly we see some people present nature as an unqualified good, and technology as, at best, a conditionally necessary evil. A return to nature will promote a flourishing life, while the interventions of artifice alienate us from our own rhythm of living. One finds compelling or forceful arguments for this opposition in the works of, for instance, Jacques Ellul, Wendell Berry, and Paul Kingsnorth. For this position, we find an insightful and well-balanced critic in Lewis Mumford, whose Technics and Human Development, The Pentagon of Power, and The City in History form a powerful trio of works.
But there can be a temptation in this simple opposition to turn it into an oversimple one. The artifice the critics seemingly want to oppose is not technology as such—or should not be, let us say—but a particular kind of machine technology; and I would suggest, most especially a particular mechanistic technological thinking. It is a thinking discussed in our white paper on the “Conception of Technology” as one that views all things as mere resources to be used. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings might think of the character Saruman: “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” It is this industrial mind, this mind that sees in all things a “standing reserve of resources” for human artificial ends, against which there is good and legitimate opposition. This technologically-dominant way of thinking persists in the post-industrial age as well, and one finds even the attempts to correct our industrial excesses fail in line with the same pattern of thought. It is the mentality that Mumford ably describes in his City in History as a “megalopolis”: an invisible city defined not by geographical limits but by a totalizing reach of such thinking.
However, we cannot forget that it belongs to human nature to produce technologies: that any home, any vehicle, any tool—indeed, even our concrete languages and systems of communication—are technologies of a kind. These are not mere contrivances for convenience, but an integral part of our flourishing as human beings.
II. Naturally Artificial Technologies
The section title here suggests another way for thinking about the artificial: namely, that it may be naturally or unnaturally ordered. It is further helpful here to think about environment: its meaning and purpose. When we identify something as an environment, we are not simply positing a set of external physical surroundings, a background or setting within which things happen. Rather, it is a place within which one lives, which place plays a role in that living. The environment shapes the life of that which lives within it, without strictly determining that life. This shaping occurs principally at a pre-intellectual level: giving us opportunities and means for perception and training us to react in accordance with the things perceived. We form pre-intellectual judgments about the good or ill of those objects, and through experience following those judgments, form habits of attraction and aversion.
Crucially, as human beings, we transcend this pre-intellectual level and subsequently, through our abstractive capacities, are able to form complex systems of instrumentation and technological intervention by which we alter the perceptual environment itself. These systems, when they make the environment more comfortable, tend to outlast the individuals who originated them, receiving further developments in subsequent generations. In other words, we pass on what we have learned.
As such, no one reading this essay has lived his or her whole life without some technological structuring of the environment. Without such technological structuring, you would not be able to read. We do not commonly or explicitly recognize the technologies that enable our activities of reading, however, because they become “sedimented” into the environment. There are many technologies that settle in this manner. Quite a few do it in a way which befits nature: that we as human persons should build roads, bridges, farms, homes, fireplaces, clothes; systems of grammar, implements of writing, publication, distribution, mail—these are all technologies which seem to enable our flourishing and which, if thoughtfully implemented, do not necessarily damage the physically given elements of our environments. They may disappear from our explicit awareness, but they continue to shape how we live day-to-day, whether conscious of them or not.
Moreover, these environments, if kept stable, reinforce our habits of living. Building technologies into our environments that help to reinforce good habits—not merely their repetition, but their conscious development and improvement—belongs to us by nature. Put otherwise, our technologies ought to serve nature: both that of the physical surroundings and of our own selves.
III. Unnaturally Artificial Technologies
Unfortunately, today we live in a world permeated by many unnatural, or let us say, anti-natural technologies. These are technologies which extend our abilities to disproportionate reach, oftentimes upsetting the balance of the physical surroundings as well. By such disproportioning, we constitute doubly-unnatural environments: contrary to our own natures and contrary to the natures of things around us. To give an examples: widespread transit via personal automobile ownership, not only kills many persons per year, not only pollutes the air, and not only indirectly kills much vegetation through salting northern roads in winter, but also results in fragmentation of our communal lives, separating work and home and friendship.
Or to use a more controversial issue being confronted today: data centers for “AI” systems allow increased compute for countless tasks which may streamline endless work operations—but at profound costs not only to the human psyche (which unlearns the demands of work) but also to the physical environment: polluting water, consuming enormous amounts of energy, and saturating the surroundings with endless distressing noise.
As the built environment became ubiquitous—hardly, if ever, can we escape it today—the “natural” becomes increasingly perceived from within that artificial framing. In other words, it, too, becomes technologized. “Green spaces” in cities become amenities, the land becomes “real estate”, a river becomes a “view”, and so on. Forests become “national parks”. Even Mount Everest becomes a “challenge” to be conquered. Yes, our technologies may “ruin” our natural environments. But more fundamentally, a technologized mind attempts to resolve nature to the artificial—and thereby does damage to nature before ever touching it.
IV. Reforming the Unnatural
Given the complex interweaving of such anti-natural artifice—long dominant in the thinking of the Western world—the temptation to simplistic opposition, even revolution, is understandable. But the visions of an idyllic, pastoral life often offered to those sickened by technological excess are nostalgic images of a fantastic and never-realized past. We must not believe that the turn to machine technologies arose out of mere laziness or material rapacity, but at least in part from the real recognition that certain tasks can be done better. There are times and occasions in which efficiency is, indeed, a virtue. This recognition turns perverse only when we lose our vision of the whole to which those tasks belong—a power of sight, admittedly, that we have all-but-abandoned in our technologized myopia of today.
But we should not cut out our eyes to cure our short-sightedness. Electricity’s permeation of all things at all times may have been recklessly implemented, for instance, and installed in such a way as to damage our natural bodily rhythms—but the ability to provide electric power to many things in many circumstances is not a small good. Take refrigeration, for instance: a great deal of food scarcity and preservation is easily alleviated by this technology. The power of electric light at night, in the occasion of an emergency—a rescue, a repair—seems almost without question an enormous benefit. (Even communities that eschew electricity and coolant refrigeration, such as the Old Order Amish, may indirectly rely upon and benefit from this tech, inasmuch as they sell to others who do use it, who would not buy their products without it.)
The principle which ought to govern the extensions and integrations of technology, in other words, is not simply to leave nature untouched by the artificial except wherever absolutely necessary for survival, but rather to ask continually the question of whether the technology’s influence or effects on nature are conducive to natural flourishing. Any efforts to reform the presence of technology in our environments today must begin with that question; which requires a strengthening of the vision by which the whole may be grasped.
V. Conclusion: Restoring Artifice to Nature
Allow a momentary digression: a popular book titled The Trivium—oft touted among those attempting to affect a return to “classical education”—claims in its opening page that the liberal arts are divided by the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). This division, the book claims, flows from diverse concerns: the trivium concerning the mind and the quadrivium concerning matter. This division is incorrect, but will not explore why here (it would take us too far afield). But it does (in a twist of irony) correctly describe that tendency towards oversimple oppositions. The arts of language and a linguistic approach to life allows the world to appear romantic, enchanted, fanciful. Well-wrought words may paint for us rich landscapes of imagination. The arts of quantity, if disconnected from those of language, appear cold and calculating: presenting a ratio divorced from the λογός. One attains order at the price of absolute sterility. Many think of the “natural” world as symbolic, richly linguistic; and the “artificial” world as numerical, spiritually void.
Not infrequently, that is—even in efforts to retain and promote the “classical”—we lapse into thinking that any two things which are at all opposed cannot truly exist in a complementary fashion. One must dominate the other. This lapse demonstrates the misunderstood nature of the human being.
That is: language and number should not be held as irreconcilably opposed, nor should nature and artifice; and we must recognize that the products of language are no less “artificial” than those of quantitative reasoning. In order properly to understand either, both must be understood as complementary to the other; arts through which we are able to articulate the whole in all its intelligible dimensions, artifice which aims to support and encourage rather than dominate and enslave nature. Our own nature, as human beings, is ordered in part through such artificial production—however often we fail at rendering our products actually coherent with that nature.
Put otherwise, the effects of artifice need not be destructive to the order of nature. Properly understood, human nature itself orders us to the production of things artificial. The flourishing of our nature entails the use of art for the protection, stewardship, and efforts at promoting flourishing for all nature.
This flourishing requires efforts to re-order our sense of the technological to its principles in the natural. The common, facile opposition against all technology—or all modern technology—romantic and charming though it is, seems to omit consideration of technology’s inherent, essential naturalness. Too often, the negative effects of technology upon the natural environment stem from our unthinking adoption of new devices, instruments, or systems—or our failure to take responsibility for that environment when these technological interventions are introduced.
Continue the Inquiry
This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “Natural and Artificial Environment” which investigates more deeply the question of environment and the effects had upon it by technological interventions.
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