When did we become such ignoramuses?

There is a memorable scene in Conrad's most famous novella, Heart of Darkness. The main protagonist, Marlowe, is navigating the Congo aboard a steamer. He has brought on a crew of natives, including one whose job is to watch the ship's wood-fired boiler. Very soon, the native grasps that if the boiler isn't fed, the steamer stops moving. He also understands that if the needle on the gauge goes too high, the boiler will explode and everybody will die. Quickly, he becomes technically proficient at his task, feeding the boiler faithfully and watching the gauge's needle fearfully. And yet, Conrad's description has the native worshipping the steamer's boiler as a god, propitiating its fiery divinity with offerings of wood and constantly in awe of the boiler's wrathful potential.

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My question is, how are we different today from that native? Embarrassingly, I'm counting myself

among the unwashed mass of ignoramuses, largely ignorant of much of the technology that we use. Think about it, here I sit, typing a blog post on a computer with very little idea of how it actually functions. Sure, I've read a little about computer code and programming, and I studied some of the principles of circuitry and power storage. I'm not exactly worshipping my computer, or my smart phone like Conrad's native worshipped the boiler. But I could not take these devices apart and put it back together again, much less build them from scratch.

Home-school scientific investigations around here these days involve doing fecal parasite egg counts for the goat herd.

What will it look like when robots take over the world? Some sci-fi storylines would have it involving something akin to human consciousness and the subsequent rebellion of the robots against their human "overlords." Yet other storylines would have it being when so many things are done through technology and automation that we've become utterly dependent (aka, enslaved).

These things can be known, grasped, understood. Yet most of us don't bother. Should we be bothered by the fact that we don't know, or that we don't bother to remedy our lacunae? Are we like the frog in a gradually warming kettle of enslaving technological ignorance? Is there a connection, in other words, between our being human, our being free, and our grasp of how things work?

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In the philosophical tradition, a distinction is often made between techne, or the practical, hands-on knowledge of a certain craft, or art, and the knowledge of first principles, or causes. Gun-smithing, computer-building, portrait-painting, and story-writing are all arts that the determined, hardworking person can master. First principles, on the other hand, answer what makes for a good computer, what makes one portrait better than another, what makes for a good story, etc., etc.

The point is, while the native in Conrad's story has mastered the techne of running the boiler, he has totally failed to grasp how the boiler functions within the parameters of the laws of physics, or what role the boiler plays in the forward motion, the speed, and the trajectory of the steamer. He is wholly incapable of judging whether the boiler is a good boiler or bad, or whether the use of a wood-fired boiler is the best means for accomplishing the intended travel from point a to point b, or even whether it's a good thing to retrieve the indomitable Mr. Kurz.

But what of us? What of we moderns who claim to understand the technology that drives our modern society?

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One interesting result of having multiple children who've reached the age of reason is that I get lots and lots of questions about how things work. Why is the moon sometimes full and not other times? Why aren't we powering cars with nuclear reactors? Why can't I build a functioning boat out of this pile of scrap wood? Why can't I crush these double-a alkaline batteries, enclose them in a pvc tube, and ignite them? This is an actual sampling of questions I've fielded, or theories I've patiently had to quash, just in the past few days. It's an awful lot of fun, at least most of the time. It's also a humbling reminder of just how little I actually understand in terms of science, technology, and, basically, the way the world works.

Obviously our increasingly complex world makes it more impossible than ever to master all possible arts. If you are good with computers, the question will be whether you are also an accomplished painter. If you've mastered painting, then the question is whether you can disassemble and reassemble the engine of your car. or perhaps whether you can fabricate a hard-to-find replacement part. Whatever our embarrassment is, therefore, it shouldn't be at not having mastered all the arts. Yet the question arises-- Is it enough to be told that your computer doesn't operate by magical principles, or do you have to have acquired at least something of the techne of computer-building in order truly to grasp this?

I'm convinced, in fact, that this is the case-- That our hunger to understand is what makes us human, and free, and that the only way to understand something is to break it down, study its constituent parts, and try to put them together again. Even if we fail to master a particular techne, we've seen the parts, and we've related them to the whole, and that makes us, if not the masters of a thing, at least not its slaves. That is the priority of the first causes that philosophy teaches us. Yet understanding the whole at least begins with studying the parts.