Everyone wants power, and they should. Yet we need to think about it in ways rather different from those animating so much of our current political discourse. My view is that the more we can increase physical power while encouraging equable distribution of metaphorical power, the better off we shall be. One of the features of influential modern thought-systems generally has been their shared investment in the notion of dynamically interacting polarities. Darwinian biology is a struggle for survival. Freudian psychology is a foggy battlefield where shadowy adversaries clash unseen. Above all there is Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” We saw some results produced by this mode of thinking of “class war” in the hecatombs in the last century, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia. I don’t know how much we learned, though. In the post-modern synthesis now dominant in our academic institutions, two categories have been added, race and sex, providing a broader pallet for our “identitities” and larger battlefields for “power struggle”.
In its physical sense power is the application of force to achieve a physical end. The sources of such power are finite, first of all the muscles of the individual human body, multiplied by the cooperation or coercion of other human or animal bodies and amplified by tools. The only sources of supplementary physical power, in the past or in the future, are the four elements of the material environment as imagined by the ancients: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
For a very long time the world’s human community, though never in stasis, ticked or staggered along in a generally steady state of population and of life of expectancy, both of them so low as perhaps to challenge our credulity today. The bare necessities of human life—sustenance, shelter, and often raiment—were long the principal but unfortunately not the only objects of the human exercise of power. Our history is deeply stained by slaughter and destruction; yet human survival is the result of cooperation, especially the cooperation between men and women. Such cooperation has been the absolute necessity for survival, an irrefutable fact sometimes obscured in contemporary political theory.
As a medievalist I insist on recognizing the dramatic exploitation of wind and water, as also the invention of powerful machines, in many parts of the ancient world. But for the unleashing of power the European Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century is of unique significance, moving over a century from windmills to steam, through electricity, to internal combustion. This was not renaissance, but new birth of power and, in effect, a new world.
The development of agriculture in the mists of Antiquity had been a major revolution on its own, Its necessary expansion now required an unprecedented expenditure of power.. Can we even imagine the power required to transform eighty acres of old growth forest into arable fields suitable for commercial plantation? You are doing this along the bank of a major tributary creek in ante-bellum Georgia. The land is crowded with eighty-foot pines of two-foot diameter, each weighting about a ton. Nobody has ever heard of backhoes or bulldozers, John Deere or the Caterpillar Corporation. Still, you’re better off than your Yankee pioneer counterpart in Western Reserve of Ohio aiming for a arable field. He’s facing some hardwoods of four-foot diameter, and closer to twenty tons. The felling is still done mainly with axes, adequate two-man crosscuts still needing perfection. And after months of grotesque labor you are left with a field of stumps. Dynamite? Never heard of it?
Occasionally we have reminders of the efforts once expended on building the pyramids or moving the monoliths to Stonehenge in certain modern pharaonic undertakings of modernity in transition. Read about the construction of Magnitogorsk, Stalin’s “magnetic mountain” steel center of the Five Year Plans. When I was a boy I met a retired engineering officer who had spent some time in pre-War China supervising the construction of roads and an aerodrome. He told me about the real “Asiatic mode of production” as he had experienced it, and it had little to do with Karl Marx. Faced with a dire lack of heavy equipment, he was able to progress only because of a nearly infinite supply of brute human labor fueled by a modest distribution of rice and bamboo shoots. He distributed differing sizes of pebbles and gravel among hundreds of coolies with instructions to scour the hillsides and creek bottoms to gather small stones of similar size and shape. Thus without mechanical crushers or screeners they piled up veritable mountains of graded stone, one pebble at a time, for compacting or creating aggregate. The expenditure of foot-pounds is staggering to contemplate.
That there are moral paradoxes involved in the expansion of our human power is almost too banal a point to make, and we don’t have to look to the age of atomic energy before recoiling from their glare. Hand-picking the seeds from a cotton boll required no superhuman strength; but from any practical point of view it is impossibly difficult, slow and tedious. The invention of a machine that could do it revolutionized the textile industry, but also greatly extended chattel slavery in the southern parts of the nascent American republic. Physical forces are indifferent. Whether power liberates or enslaves is a choice to be made by rational moral minds. Unfortunately history suggests that our power too often outstrips our wisdom.
Many very smart people think we are about to embark on a power trip of greater significance and much more rapid development than the old Industrial Revolution. Even old-fashioned people like myself, who are far from fluent in such matters, may find themselves intrigued and hopeful. Thus far human beings have gained much of our power by thinking hard about creating new machines and processes. What we are calling “artificial intelligence” is the extrapolation and application of human intelligence in an effectively new way. We have machines that can do some of our thinking, calculating, and computing tasks with the comparative ease with which Eli Whitney’s metal-fingered machine could separate cotton seed. But brave new worlds require forethought. Since even before the Luddites attacked the looms in Nottinghamshire and John Henry died with his hammer in his hand the relationship between industrial efficiency and perceived human felicity has been a contested one.
Medieval thinkers often made a distinction between two kinds of knowing: scientia (factual knowledge) and sapientia (wisdom, philosophical insight). The promise implicit in the former sometimes depends upon the exercise of the latter. Does anyone think that the seriously mixed effects of what we call “social media” could not have been improved by forethought and a serious sense of social responsibility? The avalanche of power on the horizon is inevitable, and it probably will require of us a kind of unconventional thinking at least in some degree commensurate with its own unconventionality. I keep hearing that driverless vehicles will evaporate the livelihoods of a million truckers. Such a massive dislocation of labor is hardly something that can be shrugged off as a necessary debt to social Darwinism, as it was when the advent of the motor car rendered obsolete half a dozen populous professions involving literal horsepower, including the legendary workers in buggy-whip factories, if there ever really was such a thing as a buggy-whip factory. For decades now our high schools have been educating students in fewer and fewer skills for which actual employers are willing to pay, so we might just give that some thought while we are at it. Without underestimating the malign effects of obvious social pathologies, including racial prejudice, the correlation of “inequality” (usually first thought of in financial terms) with the “education gap” should be obvious. The idea of a guaranteed minimum salary for all Americans used to fill me with dread on doctrinaire grounds that now strike me as slightly beside the point—the point being that a happy and harmonious society is more important than one with a few more billionaires and a lot more opiate addicts. Though I shall not be around to see it, I imagine the possibility of a land both rich and very smart, smart enough to marshal its enormous new power not in a zero-sum struggle among “identities” but in wide webs of fraternal cooperation, battling not one against another but against the common scourges of the one human race.
