Natural and Artificial Environment

White Paper 3 || Difficulties of Technology

I. Normative Synthesis

Theoretical Conclusions

Module 3 shifts the seminar’s attention from the interior formation of the psyche to the exterior conditions that constitute the relational possibilities within which such formation occurs.  Module 2 established that technology shapes human life primarily through the gradual establishment of habits rather than particular acts of choice; Module 3 demonstrates that such habits are not formed in abstraction from the physical world.  We must understand that, though the psychological constitution of the human person presents a first ontological foundation for technology’s effects, the physical surroundings of the environment are chronologically simultaneous with the formation of that psyche.  But these surroundings, though physical in constitution, are not merely physical: for they precipitate a dynamic pattern of interaction with our cognitive and cathectic faculties as well.  As such, our habits are cultivated, stabilized, and continually reinforced (or occasionally eroded) by these patterns of interaction constituting our environments, especially at the level of perceptual specification.  Technology’s environmental effects—profound in shifting the paradigms of perception—cannot therefore be understood as secondary or derivative consequences of its use; they are among its most fundamental and least examined modes of specification.

The central theoretical claim of this module is that environments are extrinsic formal causes.  Put otherwise, they are not mere “hosts” within which human activity is performed (as backgrounds or settings), but rather they partially determine our perceptions, encourage or discourage our patterns of movement, train us to have or lose certain expectations, and shape the possibilities of forming social relations.  Long before explicit instruction about their navigation occurs, environments train all animals—including human beings—about the possibilities of benefit, harm, and what can be ignored.  In this sense, every environment plays a pre-intellectual pedagogical role, whether it has been intentionally structured to do so or not.

At the center of this argument lies a retrieval of the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of “habit”, which retrieval is necessary for understanding technological influence.  A habit is neither something automatic nor is it a merely routine behavior or set of behaviors.  Indeed, human beings do not encounter the world through atomically-several acts of judgment that are later transformed into amalgamated routines—this is to conceive of ourselves on the patterns of the technological instruments we employ.  Rather, judgment itself is conditioned by pre-reflective dispositions—patterns of attention, expectation, affective response, memory, and depth of understanding—acquired through repeated action in relatively stable environments.  These repeated actions constitute ways of holding for the human being: that is, how the human being is towards (either internally, inasmuch as we may have one part of ourselves holding another; or externally, inasmuch as we extend intentionally in relations to objects constituting the environing world).  These ways of holding, or habits, do not operate independently of but oftentimes beneath conscious deliberation—while nonetheless orienting it.

This claim allows the seminar to overcome a persistent blind spot in contemporary discussions of technology.  Technological critique often focuses (sometimes exclusively) on discrete devices or behaviors—screens, platforms, users’ consumption patterns—while leaving the broader spatial and infrastructural context within which alone devices can function entirely unexamined.  Module 3 insists that this focus is damagingly myopic.  Indeed, technologies become most powerful when they disappear into the presupposed backgrounds of daily living: sedimented into roads, buildings, supply chains, zoning laws, systems of transit, and myriad other environmentally-constitutive factors.  At that point, they no longer appear to the user explicitly as tools, but they nevertheless continues to specify his perception of conditions and influence his thought about what is or is not possible.

This insight into environmental effects of technology builds directly upon the psychological analysis of Module 2.  Habits, once formed, require stable environments to persist.  An environment that rewards speed (rapid transit) will cultivate impatience; an environment that ignores spatial distinctiveness (the smartphone, which contains “everything”) will fragment attention; an environment that privileges efficient exchanges (automated checkout, digital purchasing) over meaningful encounter will erode communal life.  These effects occur independently of intention, and good contrary intentions inevitably fail to take root when the environments remain hostile to them.  Thus, for instance, one does not need to desire living an isolated and lonely life to become isolated and lonely if living in an environment structured against communal presence, and continued efforts at forming social relationships will become an unbearable strain if the environment is structured against realizing that possibility.

A key contribution, therefore, of Module 3 is its clarification of the meaning of “artificial environment”.  “Artificial” does not, in this instance, mean unnatural or contrary to nature.  Human beings have always lived in made or built environments.  Architecture, agriculture, and all forms of infrastructure are natural expressions of rational, embodied human life—in other words, the “artificial” is an extension of our own nature, and therefore natural to us.  The difficulty of these productive human interventions arises, however, when our artificial environments are produced according to principles that disregard the requirements of human scale: requirements such as favoring proportionate relationships of distance, speed, size; balancing life’s diverse needs (work, education, home, shopping, social relationality, privacy, etc.); and integrating with the biological world.

Here, in thinking through the ordering of our environments, the importance of scale becomes obvious.  Environments designed for large-scale optimization tend to exceed the perceptual and practical capacities of their inhabitants.  When systems become too large to be understood, maintained, or meaningfully influenced by those who depend upon them, responsibility is diffused and care is undermined.  This loss of scale does not merely produce a paradoxical situation—namely, an environment which is efficient for the whole enterprise but inefficient for the individuals involved within it—but it furthermore produces personal alienation in ever-increasing ways.

Module 3 thus introduces an environmental analogue to the psychic fragmentation identified earlier.  Just as the psyche becomes disordered when its faculties are extended without integration, so too environments become hostile when they are organized according to measures that abstract from the realities of lived experience—in both cases, we see an ordering of technology that does not resolve to the principle goal of serving human flourishing.  The result of this disorder in the environment is not necessarily imposed overt oppressions, but rather a silent erosion of our agency: the environment becomes more and more determining of our pragmatic choices and therefore we become less and less externally free.  Subsequently, one finds himself to move through spaces he in no meaningful sense inhabits, depending upon systems without understanding them, and choosing between options he does not want.

This analysis also deepens the seminar’s account of technology as a form of revealing.  When environments are understood primarily in terms of function or utility—traffic flow, energy efficiency, logistical optimization—nature is again reinterpreted as a standing-reserve of resources.  Green space becomes amenity; land becomes real estate; place becomes location.  The issue is not merely environmental degradation, though that is real, but rather a narrowing of perception, in which environments lose their capacity to disclose meaning beyond their stipulated and approved uses (anticipating a question pertinent to Module 6, namely, concerning governmental regulation).

Importantly, Module 3 shows that—given the depth of its psychological affectivity—our environmental harms often manifest psychologically and socially before they appear physically.  Disorientation, isolation, impatience, and loss of communal trust are not incidental side effects of environmental design but frequent indicators that we have failed to produce environments adequately supportive for the kinds of lives human beings are well-suited to live.  Thus, environmental critique cannot be separated from anthropological understanding.

The module also clarifies why environmental reform is so difficult.  Because environments shape habit pre-reflectively, their influence is rarely made into an explicitly thematic object of inquiry.  More often than not, the path of least resistance for an individual, with respect to a built environment, is to make personal adaptations rather than to seek holistic reforms.  As such, over time, what was once experienced as a distortion of life comes to feel normal—not because we have adapted to thrive, but we have learned to accept our less-than-ideal conditions as simply “the way things are”.  The environment succeeds in malforming us most thoroughly whenever its formative efficacy goes unnoticed.

This insight prepares the way for later analyses of culture and governance as loci of dominance by technological thinking.  That is, once technological rationality is built into our physical and psychologically-affective spaces, that technologized thinking no longer needs to be enforced ideologically.  It becomes “common sense” (even if quite contrary to what is good for the human person).  Movement patterns, work rhythms, and social expectations come to align with the established infrastructural realities, and alternative forms of life become increasingly difficult not only to instantiate but even to imagine.

Module 3 therefore reinforces the seminar’s central thesis that technological difficulties are structural rather than discrete or merely episodic.  Our problems, that is, do not arise merely from individual bad actors or isolated poor decisions, but from the cumulative effects of environments ordered toward partial goods—such as speed, efficiency, profitable scalability, etc.—without regard for the whole of human life or the integration of environments with good psychological habits.

At the same time, we must be cautious against lapsing into idealized romantic or primitivist responses.  We do not oppose artificial environments as such—again, their construction belongs to the human being by nature.  Rather, what should be opposed are environments that are uninhabitable in the full human sense; that is, habits which demand habits contrary to the human good.  We must question how environments are made and to what end.  Environments can either support memory, inhabitation, and genuine interpersonal relationships—or, as common today, undermine them.

In conclusion, Module 3 proposes a critical methodological lesson: technological critique must attend to the structuring of external space as well as the internal formation of the psyche.  Without conscious and continually reflective attention being paid to the constitution of our environment, calls for personal responsibility sound like mere moralism, and calls for reform of our environments remain abstract and impractical.  Because human beings are embodied and spatial creatures, the ordering of space is inseparable from the ordering of the well-lived human life.  We take up the practical steps needed—and expanded by improvements in technological instruments—for reforming and reorienting our environments in the Opportunities of Technology seminar.

In this way, Module 3 translates the interior deformation described in Module 2 into exterior, physical forms, and it prepares the conceptual ground for Module 4’s analysis of biological life.  The same technological rationality that reshapes environments will, inevitably, reshape the body that inhabits them.

Practical Actions Indicated

1. Environmental Design Is a Moral Responsibility for All of Us

Environmental design is never morally neutral, but its results are either more or less conducive to psychological well-being.  Architects, planners, engineers, designers, and policymakers therefore bear responsibility not only for efficiency and safety but more principally for the kinds of lives their designs make likely.

This responsibility extends to digital environments, which increasingly function as spaces of interpersonal and informational encounter and movement, distinct from but nevertheless analogous to physical ones.

2. We Must Recover Human Scale

A consistent practical implication is the need to recover environments that can be understood, navigated, and cared for by their inhabitants with reasonable efforts and timing.  Such environments favor persons with local knowledge, a walkable scale of neighborhoods, thoughtful curation of mixed-use spaces, and architectural forms that support human presence rather than mere transit or disproportioned expanse.

3. Resistance to Total Optimization

Optimization according to a single metric—whether that is speed, profit, or energy expenditure—inevitably distorts environmental goods and our ability to care for and create them.  The module calls for resistance to total optimization in favor of plural goods, including beauty, durability, community, and proportionate frames for disclosure of information and communication.

4. Seeking Integration Rather Than Segregation

Technological environments, when constituted within a technologized mindset, often segregate functions: work from home, commerce from community, production from consumption.  This module suggests that reintegration—where possible—is essential for restoring environments that contribute to rather than contradict a coherently meaningful life.

II. Descriptive Analysis

Central Question

How do technological interventions alter the built environments in which human beings live, and in what sense do artificial environments feed back into human perception, behavior, and flourishing?

Principal Bibliography

Readings:
Mumford 1961: The City in History, c.17, “The Myth of Megalopolis”.
Engelmann 2007: “The Mechanistic and the Aristotelian Orientations toward Nature and their Metaphysical Backgrounds”.

Background Reading:
Eddington 1927: The Nature of the Physical World, c.1, “The Downfall of Classical Physics”.
Heidegger 1942: Lecture on Aristotle’s Physics B.1.
Wallace 1996: The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis.
Engelmann 2017: Nature and the Artificial: Aristotelian Reflections on the Operative Imperative.

Orientation

Module 3 extends the inquiry from the interior life of the psyche to the exterior conditions in which that psyche is situated.  The guiding claim of this module is that built environments are not neutral containers of human activity but dynamic realities that actively influence our perception, possibilities of movement, social expectations, and social interactions.  Technology’s environmental effects are therefore not secondary consequences of its use but intrinsic expressions of its causality.

The seminar emphasizes that “environment” must be understood broadly.  It includes not only wilderness and ecosystems, but also built spaces, infrastructure, urban design, domestic architecture, and the technological mediation of movement and place.  Artificial environments are not opposed to nature as such; rather, they are natural products of human making.  The difficulty arises when artificial environments are produced according to principles that disregard the requirements of human scale, intelligibility, and proper physical proportioning—and increasingly we find this to be the case not only through bad principles of architecture and design, but also as forms of digital communication become increasingly embedded in these built environments, transforming places into complex vectors of distant information, causing the place itself to recede from our conscious awareness.

Major Findings

1. Environments Educate the Senses

One of the principal insights of the module is that environments function pedagogically for our sensory faculties.   Before explicit instruction occurs, that is, environments train the perceptual senses by determining what is important, accessible, or safe to ignore.  The orientations and shapes of streets, the speed of transit, the availability of green space, the proportioning of rooms, the distance between work and home, the closeness and instrumentally-mediated relatedness of communities, and the dominance of screens all condition how human beings perceive and inhabit the physical world.

Technological environments, especially those oriented toward efficiency and transitory movement, tend to privilege speed, individualistic action, and a constant offering of visual novelty.  This sensory training feeds back directly into psychic life, reinforcing those habits of impatience, distraction, and detachment already described in Module 2.

2. The Built Environment Is a Technological Artifact

Modern discourse often treats technology as something added onto otherwise stable and, as it were, “non-technological” spaces.  We reject this narrow conception.  Roads, zoning laws, housing developments, industrial agriculture, and supply chains are themselves technological achievements.  They habituate us towards background assumptions about human movement, work, and social life.  Even non-industrial and non-modern integrations with the natural environment constitute technologies—specific facultative extensions—of a kind, altering the way their inhabitants view the world.

Thus, when these background assumptions are themselves poorly ordered—aiming at domination rather than cooperation—the environment becomes hostile to human flourishing, even when no explicit harm is intended.  Environments designed for vehicles rather than pedestrians, for instance, quietly erode communal interaction and bodily competence, producing a voluntarily-entered spiral of self-isolation.  One thinks of the common experience of suburban life: disconnected, fragmented, lacking either the natural rhythms of the rural or the social rhythms of the urban.

3. Scale and Proportion Are Central Environmental Concerns

A recurring theme of the discussion carried out within this module was that of scale.  Technologies that operate effectively at large scales often distort, pervert, or otherwise obviate meaning as realized in local proportions.  The seminar draws attention to the way centralized systems operating at large scales—including but not limited to the logistical, information, governmental, economic, or educational—undermine the capacity of individuals and communities to understand and maintain the environments they depend upon.

Loss of properly proportionate scale and an awareness of its importance results in fragility of many kinds, but especially social fragility.  When systems break, those who inhabit them lack not only the knowledge and the agency but also the community to respond appropriately—most especially when the systems have resulted in isolation of individuals.  The dependence of these individuals upon their systemically-structured environments thereby becomes a kind of radical vulnerability when those systemic structures cease to work for the individuals in question.

4. a Common Modern Difficulty: Nature Interpreted as Resource

Consistent with earlier discussions of technological revealing, Module 3 highlights the tendency to understand nature primarily as a standing reserve of resources. This applies not only to extraction industries but also to urban planning, agriculture, human labor, and energy production.

The danger lies not simply in environmental degradation through poor execution—of both natural and built environments—but also in the weakness of perception wrought by shallow understanding.  That is, when environments are understood solely in terms of their apparent utility, their role in shaping human experience and meaning becomes obscured; for man’s purposes become their measure, and anything unmeasurable in their being is deemed purposeless.

Key Explanatory Claims

Environments are objective-specifying causes of our interpretatively-formed worlds, not merely passive backdrops. 
Put otherwise, while the background does not determine the objects of the foreground as such, it both frames their presentation and influences our interpretation of those foregrounded objects.  We imperil our understanding of the world by neglecting its background structures..

Artificial environments shape human behavior independently of individual intention.
This shaping occurs regardless of whether the individual has conscious awareness of that environment’s influence upon his mind.  When we have environments that are conducive to our flourishing, this shaping tends to be beneficial; if our environments are hostile to that flourishing, our behavior ends up harming us as persons.

Environmental harm often manifests psychologically and socially before it becomes physically evident.
Our patterns of behavior follow our patterns of interpretation, and the harms behaviorally revealed run much deeper than the individual actions by which they were created.  That is, we suffer not only physiological harms but interpersonal and psychical by environmental factors such as informational overload, preponderance of options, disappearance of distance, and so on.

Disproportionate scale undermines responsibility and care.
We very often cease taking personal responsibility for any harm when large-scale institutions affect so much of our world’s constitution.  Obvious examples include our purchasing decisions (from whom are we buying?  Do we even know?  Is it our responsibility to know?  Do such purchases harm our neighbors?) and our information “consumption” (why is the news I read concerned solely with things about which I can do little, if anything?).

Technological environments mediate the relationship between nature and culture.
Treating that mediation with neglect leads to an explanatory gap in our experience of the world, such that the two forces—the natural and the cultural—comes to seem as intrinsically at odds with one another.  But we always interact with the natural on the basis of something “culturally” developed.