Old Archbishop Dom Gregory Diamare, the abbot [of Monte Cassino], talking one day to [Count] Gavronski about the barbarism into which Europe was in danger of sinking through war, said that during the darkest Middle Ages the monks of Monte Cassino had saved Western civilization by copying the ancient and precious Greek and Latin manuscripts by hand. "What should we do today to save European culture?" concluded the venerable abbot. "Have the same manuscripts copied on typewriters by your monks," replied Gavronski. [2]
On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leased by British Petroleum to drill for oil off U.S. coastline adjoining the Gulf of Mexico, suffered a catastrophic explosion which killed 11, injured 17, and caused the rig to sink to the bottom of the ocean. As of this writing, the ruptured oil well head has spewed crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico continuously for 46 days. Numerous attempts to stop the flow of oil have failed.
A great deal else about this incident has already been said, and continues to be said elsewhere. It would seem idle to recount the technical facts of petroleum extraction and spill response, or to add to the litany of well-deserved blame and opprobrium. The episode of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is plainly horrifying for the nightmarish destruction it wreaks, and will to continue to wreak, on a large part of the world we live in. It is, however, equally horrifying for a much subtler reason that we all, as architects and beneficiaries of late technological civilization as it exists today, would do well to contemplate.
It deserves to be said that extracting oil from deep beneath the ocean floor is an engineering feat so complex and difficult that its success could justly be called miraculous. This is to say nothing of the scientific knowledge that made it possible for humans to convert a chemical compound, stored millions of years ago deep within the Earth's crust, into vastly powerful source of energy, ready to almost any imaginable use to which its possessors might put it. The activities of the Deepwater Horizon before the catastrophe represent a display of amazing technological power. The utter failure of attempts to seal the Deepwater Horizon's ruptured well represent the amazing impotence of that same technological power in the face of its own consequences.
How are the limitations of our own technological powers currently understood and dealt with by those who most directly wield them? A public comment on the catastrophe by former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator and former CEO of Shell Oil, William Reilly, is telling:
The extraordinary success of this industry in developing technology to go deeper and deeper into the sea to put down a well, essential well, and then go out in all directions to get the product up is breathtaking.
And the condition, as nearly as I can tell from looking at the photographs and the movies from what's happening in the Gulf, is that the response technology is about as primitive as it was in the Exxon Valdez case [over 20 years ago]. That is the skimmers that are dysfunctional in the open ocean, the booms that break, as you say, with the slightest wave action, dispersants that are not ready for prime time, that may or may not be toxic, something that has to be determined in the event, which seems to me ought to have been anticipated, with impacts on fish that really need to be very carefully acknowledged and may or may not have been.[3]
If a comment such as this one, on an episode such as that currently facing the United States, is at all revealing, then it points to an alarming short-sightedness and gross indifference to risk on the part of those who manage and direct of some of the human species' greatest technological powers. In a more immediate setting, such destructive myopia and callousness would be termed 'barbarism.'
Communitarian philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre memorably wrote less than 30 years ago that "the Barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time."[1] MacIntyre was concerned with what he saw as the rapid decay of morality and civility in the West, but in light of comments such as those by Mr. Reilly above, such a sentiment certainly applies to the frightening negligence with which the high technology of the human species has been lately deployed. The threat of such negligence is twofold: either the human species will effect technological suicide, or our civilization will abruptly and violently recoil (or be forced to recoil) from the powerful tools we have developed to serve human needs and wants. We have no reason to believe that either outcome is inevitable, but neither do we have any good reason to believe that either is impossible.
The threat of technological self-destruction is not a new appearance, and much comment has already been made on it, especially through the latter half of the 20th century. Much more insidious is threat that our way of life may collapse due to a justified but unmanageable aversion to the tools and mechanisms that sustain it. Barbarism begets barbarism. Every technology devised serves some genuine human want, and so no such device is fundamentally evil or corrupt. Be that as it may, many of our powers are now routinely used by persons and organizations whose motives are at best short-sighted. With this misconduct comes the real danger of delegitimizing the base of theoretical and practical knowledge sustaining the technologies that now feed, clothe, and shelter more of humanity than at any other time in history. Accumulated knowledge is surprisingly fragile, and if our civilization comes to associate our current powers only with greed and destruction -- a view which is still in the minority, but growing both in range and intensity -- there is a real threat that it may be neglected and thereby lost.
It is only through the labors of a preciously small number of scholars and monastics that the works of Classical civilization survived into the Renaissance. Such ancient ideas may at first appear flawed or baseless when viewed in retrospect, through centuries of intellectual and scientific progress. It should nonetheless be remembered that at the time, the ancient works of the Greeks and Romans represented the limits of human learning, and went on to lay the foundation for the very erudition that now finds them quaint. As oil spews unabated into the ocean adjoining one of the most affluent and powerful nations on Earth, it seems conjectural but not idle to fear the coming of a technological and economic dark age. In spite of the abuses to which it has been put, we have labored long and hard for the scientific and engineering knowledge the human species has accumulated, and should not easily let it go, and more work remains if this knowledge is to be transmitted to future generations.
There is good reason to believe that the barbarians are upon us, and this peril issues an urgent question to the scientists, engineers, technologists, scholars, and ordinary citizens of this time and place: What part of our technological knowledge can we save, and how?
[1] MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
[2] Malaparte, Curzio, Cesare Foligno (trans.). Kaputt. New York Review of Books, 2005.
[3] Originally broadcast June 3, 2010, on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show". Video also available here.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
