The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Michael Sacasas - when should we take the long way round?
Michael Sacasas writes about technology and human flourishing through his wildly popular newsletter The Convivial Society. I have been reading his work for a number of years and find it both winsome and wise. It was delight to have the opportunity to speak to him about a question he thinks we should be asking ourselves.
In this conversation we explore the question of what humans should still do for themselves even when technology can do it better or more efficiently. This conversation challenges our assumptions about technological progress and asks us to consider what makes for a truly good human life.
• Technology often promises efficiency but requires us to question what we might be losing in the process
• Albert Borgman's concept of "focal things" versus "devices" helps us understand what's lost when we automate tasks
• Central heating removed family participation and togetherness that came with maintaining a hearth
• Writing by hand or thinking through drafts teaches us what we think in ways AI writing can't replace
• Even mundane tasks like washing dishes can provide valuable moments for reflection and conversation
• The Amish demonstrate thoughtful technology adoption by evaluating each innovation against community values
• Getting outdoors, learning names of plants and animals, and cooking together builds connection with the world
• Leading with positive practices rather than just limiting technology helps children understand family values
• Face-to-face encounters and "weak ties" with neighbors become increasingly important in our mediated world
If you've found this episode valuable, please subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, to stay up to date with forthcoming episodes, and read regular reflections on these interviews.
I don't know that I have this question formulated in the most elegant way possible, but I'll try it this way. So some variation on this question, but I'll try it this way. So some variation on this question. What is it good for people to do, even though a machine might be able to do it just as well, right? So the background here is just a promise that, whether it's AI or other forms of technology, will automate or displace or take over some task that would have otherwise been performed by a human being.
Michael Sacasas:And what are the question tries to get at? What are the criteria that we might use to evaluate whether this is a good thing to do? And it presupposes and I say even if right, so even if the answer is sometimes, well, the machine can't do it as well as the person, and then maybe some threshold is crossed and all of a sudden it can. So if we allow for the fact that maybe there are any number of tasks that some machine, whether AI powered or not, will be able to accomplish it in a way that passes muster by a human standard, is it nonetheless good for a person to be involved in this kind of activity? So that's both the short version and the long-winded version. Does that question itself make sense?
Kenny Primrose:It makes very good sense. Yeah, you mentioned AI, and what comes to mind very quickly are large language models taking over thinking and writing and things like that. But we could go into history to start talking about central heating and, fairly now, basic technology that has, I suppose, displaced certain functions, and so maybe, before we get into some of the modern kind of challenges and technologies that we're around, what are the things that come up for you, looking at history, and you think, well, here is a technology that made us more efficient, quicker, freed up some leisure time, but actually cost us something that we haven't really acknowledged fully yet. Is there anything that comes up? Know, the last few hundred years.
Michael Sacasas:Sure, my thinking goes to an example in the work of albert borgman. So I think albert borgman, who recently passed away, within the last um year he was a philosopher of technology, um, taught at the university of montana for many years I I find him particularly helpful in giving us some categories and concepts with which to approach this question. So there's an example that he uses in his work that I think is helpful. Here he invites us to consider what was involved in heating a home prior to central heating, where you would use a hearth or a fireplace or some other kind of wood-burning technology to provide warmth. And what he's trying to do is show us a contrast between what he calls focal, focal things and devices. The promise of a device, in his way of using this word, is that it will make something easier, more controllable, less effortful, safer. So it presents us with a kind of commodious surface that's easy to use and manipulate, as opposed to whatever it is that it's displacing. But the focal thing is the thing that engages us. It may require a little bit more work, effort, labor on our part. It may not be entirely without risks, but it gathers people, it focuses attention, it engages the user. So with that with those terms in mind, right? So he considers the work involved in heating a home, which may involve cutting wood, preparing that wood for the fire, someone bringing that wood in, lighting the fire, maintaining the fire, and how that involves all members of the household. In theory, right. If you have a household of parents and children, it would involve various members of the household in contributing to the performance of that task. Now, of course, we set a thermostat, we push a button or a few buttons, and all that work is displaced and taken over by central heating Obviously a lot easier, there's no little risk involved, but you're going to burn yourself in the process. It's something we can now put out of mind.
Michael Sacasas:I imagine the next step after Borgman wrote this in the 80s, we might now imagine an automated nest type thermostat device, which makes it even further out of mind. So the question I think that's worth considering here is that these are very I like to think that these are people have to think about them in specific context and given their own particular situation in life, right? So what Borgman is helping us see is some of the differences that we might miss, some of what is lost, and he is not, I think, prescribing right. So this is in part why I tend to prefer questions rather than prescriptions, because in many cases we might arrive at different calculations of what it is good for us to do given our particular circumstances. So it's not as if I think Borgman is trying to prescribe something universal Everybody must have a hearth.
Michael Sacasas:If you don't have a hearth, somehow you're morally failing as a human being but rather I think he's trying to help us think about some of the goods that were conditioned around the presence of certain kinds of technologies and the practices that they encouraged, and to ask whether the ease and efficiency that were promised when these are automated or mechanized in some way or form, whether it is an unalloyed good to opt for efficiency, or whether or not there's some costs that are not just a matter of maybe binding a community together or family together in this example, but that it is good for us to have a certain skill set right. There's certain skills that we can have that make us feel competent. There's mastery over the world, sufficiency that is helpful for us psychologically, even just to flourish as human beings, a sense of satisfaction, be able to do certain things for ourselves, and again I want to stress that configuration of what those things may be may vary person to person, family to family, community to community, but that we require some things like that. And so when we begin to always opt for efficiency, comfort, safety, security, we delegate tasks, we lose skills. Because we outsource the skills, whether those are physical or intellectual, the some effect may be unconsciously depriving ourselves of some of the friction, the challenge, the need to apply ourselves, the intellectual, physical engagement with the world that to some degree may be a component of our flourishing, doing well in the world. So that's one example, so we can then think of all sorts of other possibilities.
Michael Sacasas:So much modern technology, from industrial age forward, of course, has been premised on this idea of time saving right. And the other question is how much time is actually saved? The classic work here is a text by the historian Ruth Cohen Schwartz. She has a book called More Work for Mother, written in the early 80s, examining the promise of labor-saving technologies from the early 20th century. It was the case that often these didn't deliver on their promises because in some cases they multiplied tasks that weren't possible before.
Michael Sacasas:I think of email in a contemporary setting. How fascinating it must have been in the early years of email to think, oh, I'm saving so much time, I don't have to write this out by hand, I can type it out quickly, it's not taking several days to arrive, I don't have to put a stamp in it, I don't have to go to the post office. And lo and behold, here we are wondering where all our time went, many of us thinking that we spend most of our days in email because that threshold of efficiency actually created more, a higher quantity of work, even though it made some of the processes involved easier. So I'll stop there.
Kenny Primrose:I feel like I began to ramble a little bit, but yeah, I didn't feel rambling at all. There was so much in it. I get your point on kind of the law of induced demand. I believe when washing machines and dishwashers were invented, what back in the 50s or so, it's just the level of cleanliness and expectation went up for a household, there's more to do.
Kenny Primrose:It didn't free them up. And, as you say, this idea of getting to the end quicker, whether it's warmth or cleanliness, what you lose along the way is, as Borgman pointed out, it's huge but it's hard to quantify. It's the fact that you're a contributor to the household which gives you a sense of belonging rather than a consumer. I think of shopping. Presumably it's the same in the us. In the uk I don't know the proportion, I think many people get it delivered to the door and the community that that happened. When you went to the shops or the exercise, you got bringing back the shopping from the shops. There's this.
Kenny Primrose:It makes me think of marshall mcclune's questions what is this technology extending? And then, when it's overextended, what is that amputating? And it's those amputations that are often harder to see, and I suppose then the Sorry, no, you go ahead. I suppose the question is what is good for people to do, even if it can be done by a machine, as you say. It presupposes that efficiency and the end product are not the goal, even though they are invariably the explicit goal A fire, the goal is to have warmth to dry your clothes or whatever, and so in some sense it requires you to think what are you trying to achieve if you choose the less efficient or less productive option? Maybe what comes to you with that kind of question?
Michael Sacasas:Yes, I think that the underlying point here is that we are focused on those outputs and we tend to think that the means are a matter of indifference, right? So this is, I think, an important part to highlight here. So, as long as I get output X, it doesn't matter how I achieve it. Now, it may be in some cases, that may very well be the case, but I don't think we should assume that it is necessarily the case, right? So one example that's now in the cultural era a little bit more, because large language models are able to do these cognitive tasks to produce essays, to produce writing. On the platform Substack, populated by a lot of writers, as you might imagine, on their notes feature, which is a social media aspect of the platform, I see a lot of writers addressing this question, right, trying to think through the implications, trying to deliberate or debate when is it appropriate to use generative AI in the writing process, et cetera. And so I don't know that I want to suggest that it is always improper to use it or it is always wrong, morally or with regards to the craft, to use this, but we need to ask what makes the difference, right? So, in terms of writing, some have suggested. We use this. You can use this tool to write the first draft, right? You give it a prompt, you feed it the information, maybe the thesis statement. You use it to write the first draft, then you review it, you revise it, and so it's still passing through your intellect, so to speak. Then you review it, you revise it, and so it's still passing through your intellect, so to speak. But the question that comes to my mind when I think about that is that very often I learn what I think about something through that drafting process. And it's not pretty. It can be laborious. It can mean sitting down for a while and writing some stuff and feeling like, wow, this was really not great. Scrapping it, starting again to get at the idea, develop the argument, learn that the argument maybe is weaker than you imagined at the outset, and I know it has been my experience that to begin writing about something, I'm surprised by where I end up at the end of it. So what this is suggesting is that the process itself is valuable, right? So you might say the end goal is you just produced a thousand words that your editor is requiring, or that your teacher is requiring, or whatever the case may be right that your employer is requiring for ad copy or whatever, but there's something involved in the process of arriving at those hypothetical thousand words that is valuable. And so, across domains, I think about another example that often is used in these conversations is washing dishes. Right, so you mentioned washing machines earlier, but in this case, washing dishes For whatever reason, this is just something people keep coming back to and the dishwasher makes that relatively simple.
Michael Sacasas:There's maybe a genuine question about use of resources, thinking economically, thinking in terms of the environment, etc. The water usage in a community, there's all that. But then if somebody were to ask, what do I gain by doing dishes by hand? And someone might say and I've heard people say they will say I have the option of using the machine, but I find that there's this the nature of that work is such that I can become very thoughtful through that process. It allows me to think it has this kind of. It's one of these tasks that is in that sweet spot of occupying our mind in such a way that it sustains reflection. Right, we're able to. We don't have to give the task our full attention. It almost just serves as a kind of. I'm trying to think of a good metaphor here, but it supports the ability to be 15 to 20 minutes in a state of relative internal calm, right so that we're able to think. Well, is that valuable? I think that's valuable. Anecdotally, I've heard many people tell me how valuable it is. In some cases, some people use the time for more meditative thinking or even prayer, and so this goes back to the observation you made at the outset of this question.
Michael Sacasas:Often what we're talking about when we're trying to identify these goods one, they're things that we wouldn't have thought about until they're taken away or until they're replaced or displaced.
Michael Sacasas:And two, they are very difficult to quantify in various cases. It would be hard for me. I'm not quite sure how I would approach quantifying the loss of a few minutes of reflection that might accompany a task like washing dishes after dinner or something like that. I've also heard people say again to bring in the communal dimension that maybe a young married couple that found that was a very productive time for them One would wash, one would dry and they would have good conversations around that time. And again, that may not be the case for everybody, but for some people there's something that might be lost in the automating that works. So I think it just requires us to be very thoughtful about what is happening in the process. What are the things that are part and may but might even be part of the end goal? But but they are dependent upon doing the task in a certain way or deploying certain means. The means are not interchangeable, I suppose.
Kenny Primrose:You mentioned, I think, earlier something about delegating these tasks, and it's something you've written about. Like life cannot be delegated, and there's a sense in which you what you're saying is that life exists in these mundane I think it means like of this world and these kind of mundane tasks, and these are therefore not things that we have to get through in order to be able to be people of leisure or pleasure. Do you think this is a kind of broad misconception, that when you get through the kind of the stuff of life, and the quicker you do it, the more time you'll have, you're going to get to do what you were made to do, which is just to do something? Slightly Hellenistic philosophy?
Kenny Primrose:about this, I'll just get to sit and stroke my beard. Is that an idea that you think we need to disabuse ourselves of?
Michael Sacasas:Yeah, I think so. That's always, I think, a poignant question to ask when somebody is trying to sell you something. That will save you a great deal of time to ask what exactly am? You mentioned the idea that life is the perfect state, or the ideal state, or happiness. Or we find happiness when we're able to enter a state of undisturbed contemplation. And this via contemplativa, the contemplative life, is the good life, as opposed to the via activa, the active life. There's versions that are found in classical philosophy. There are versions that are found in religious traditions.
Michael Sacasas:I don't want to discount this altogether. Right, I think contemplation is a good. I think we could probably all use more time for contemplation, especially if you have religious or moral reasons to pursue that, and then, especially if you have religious or moral reasons to pursue that. So it's not as if I want to discard that ideal altogether or to say that life should be all labor, but I think there's a genuine correction maybe that we need to undergo, or just to ask ourselves when the labor is the point, and I think this is true, maybe easiest to see in cases where care is involved for other human beings. Right, my oldest, I have two children, the oldest about to turn 10.
Michael Sacasas:So their sort of infancy and toddler years is not too far behind in their rear view mirror. And I think of how much technology now around infancy, childhood, exists in the space of helping you to monitor or to outsource really your attention, your care for a child, for an infant, or when we there are one maybe dystopic variation of this and the other spectrum of life. I'm trying to recall the. It was a commercial, I think, for either an Amazon device or maybe it was a device connected with Facebook where it would provide kind of companionship for the lonely elderly individual and it was essentially a kind of chatbot of some sort. Right, and in these cases I think the ideal is that there is human companionship, there is human involvement, that the parent is involved with the child.
Peter Gray:And.
Michael Sacasas:I will acknowledge that of course there are questions and discussions to be had here about the way in which some of these rules have been gendered and maybe unjustly distributed under certain circumstances. Right, no-transcript the point as a human being, to be involved in people's lives and in the lives of our loved ones in these sort of care-laden ways, to accept some of these burdens as not burdens in the pejorative sense, but things that it is our privilege to carry and to bear for one another, for our communities, for our families. Charged cases where we can ask what exactly am I being freed up to do? Is it just to become a passive consumer of entertainment, of goods and services, without any real involvement in the world of people and things, in such a way that I would feel a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a sense of fulfillment? Yeah, I think that idea that it's always good to save time, to outsource labor, is something we should at least not take for granted and interrogate a little bit more carefully.
Kenny Primrose:Yeah, there's something in what you mentioned on care of the elderly or of your children that brings out the. If you think of bots doing that, or have you seen the film Her where? Who is it? Is it Joaquin Phoenix falls? In love with an operating system. There's a kind of disgust impulse to that and I sometimes wonder whether that impulse is telling us something. It's a kind of revulsion to something that we're getting information there.
Kenny Primrose:There's something dehumanizing in this that is, it felt rather than thought, in a sense because, if you could rationally care for an elderly person and stop them feeling lonely, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that solve the loneliness problem in some way? And yeah, it would. But something doesn't sit right in allowing that. My neighbors have recently purchased it's, this device, and it's several thousand pounds.
Kenny Primrose:I think it's a very fancy bit of kit and it basically it does everything for you and cooks you an amazingly well-balanced meal. It tells you what to do, you throw it all in the pot and you basically have saved yourself the labor of cooking. They love it. It's one of those pieces of technology which I feel like is exciting to get. But what is the de-skilling? And the de-skilling is one part, and also just that process of chopping onions and chatting to someone while you chop onions and smelling it, and there's something I think maybe I'm getting at the disembodied nature of these technologies that seems harder to put your finger on. As a problem, yeah, but it feels like a problem yes, I think that's right.
Michael Sacasas:And it's hard because you can struggle to defend the thing that you feel intuitively is good and important here. Right, and there are. You know, I keep wanting to flag all of these tensions because I'm a working parent, you know, put in your hours at the job and you come home and cook a lot of meals and it could feel like, wow, this is. It'd be wonderful if I could just come home and not think about that and just have that. Somehow. Some technology, easily, you know, do this for me. That promise is very old, right. I think of in the 19, maybe 60s or 70s, the promise of what here in the States were called TV dinners, so you get these prepackaged meals, right, I think probably the quality has come up a little bit since then. But is there something? What I've discovered is I wrote about this maybe a year and a half, two years ago somewhere in the newsletter, realizing, you know, at first being a little frustrated also by the fact that my kids, who were a little bit younger, wanted to be involved and in a sense that makes the whole thing a little less efficient, right, but happily, I think, I realized wait, this is actually an opportunity, right, this could be a gift that I'm granted right, to be able to spend this time with my daughter time to talk, think over the day, to teach her. Right To learn myself, to teach her skills she enjoys. And even the.
Michael Sacasas:I may not always have the time to savor every sort of tactile encounter, right, but I do think there was a Episcopal bishop from the last century who wrote a book about cooking and food and theology, and he has this section in there where he talks about just sitting with the onion and reflecting on its nature and the sort of thing that it is and allowing all of your senses to engage with it. And so at one level maybe somebody listening to my thing was just sort of ridiculous. And certainly even he says no-transcript common. It's almost like a meme that you hear sometimes, right, that the average modern person has more spices in their, so many spices in their cabinet that it would make a medieval king blush, right, and then I've often thought that the rejoinder to that is but for that reason, do we even care and do we even take the time to appreciate right to enjoy that? Because we're so rushed and we're so focused on efficiency?
Kenny Primrose:You're listening to the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny Primrose. Today I'm in discussion with Michael Sarkasas, who is helping people like me, and you think carefully about the way technology is shaping our lives and our characters. If you're enjoying this, do please think about subscribing and leaving a review. It will help others find us. What you were just saying, michael, made me think about camping.
Kenny Primrose:Camping is full of friction and difficulty and everything is hard and you get wet and tired and you sleep badly, and so I enjoy camping, and I enjoy wild camping, partly because it makes you very present and there's something about the process that engages you in what you're doing. There's no shortcuts here and it also draws out your appetite. I think there's this lovely essay by Laurie Lee called Appetite, where he talks about the TV dinner thing, the fact that our appetites are always blunted. We don't know what it's like to drink water from a stream, what that feels like to drink water from a from a stream, to what that feels like to parch lips anymore, and anticipation, and but this is true with food, but it's true with everything, yes, that we have too much of too readily available. It blunts our longing for it and in the same, we fail to appreciate its goodness yeah, no, absolutely.
Michael Sacasas:And I think you mentioned that life cannot be delegated. That's a line from Lewis Mumford's essay where he talks about the technological, the magnificent bribe that we're offered. Right, you, modern technological society offers you all of these wonderful things, these things that, yes, by historical standards are just luxurious, and few human beings have ever enjoyed this level of access to transportation, to safety, instantaneous communication, entertainment on demand, et cetera, et cetera. And his wording is very eloquent and I won't get it quite right, but at one simple cost, which is that we don't ask for anything other than what the system provides and that we accept all that the system provides for us.
Michael Sacasas:And I think you know, in citing that I said there's in passing, I mentioned that there's something very profound that speaks to the nature of human desire in our present sort of techno-economic milieu, and I think it's related to what you're describing. Right, the visceral experiences that you're describing, our wants are programmed and conditioned in such a way that we may be missing out on a kind of quality and texture and richness of life that is inseparable from a measure of effort, involvement, engagement, struggle to some degree, and maybe even I'm not sure what the right word here is I want to say periods of measured deprivation, right, and I hesitate to say that because I don't want to suggest that the good life is a life of deprivation, right, where people don't have enough to eat, people don't have access to medical care, right. This is always the kind of thing you hear is like well, you want a life without penicillin, right, and the point is never to go back, right. This is not about a romantic vision of the past, right. It is simply about asking how can things get better, right? What are we missing If we've developed a world in which we have a surfeit of goods at least some, and those again, not always justly distributed, but a surfeit of good for many people. And yet we find ourselves unhappy, dissatisfied, plagued by ennui or whatever the case. Whatever the case, something is off.
Michael Sacasas:Okay, so what can we do? Not to go back right, but what corrections? What things need to be reconfigured? What have we maybe unwittingly traded away? Corrections, what things need to be reconfigured? What have we maybe unwittingly traded away?
Michael Sacasas:Because, again, you imagine, through the early process of development of the modern technological milieu, you have things that are just making life tangibly better, alleviating suffering. At that point you're probably not asking what am I losing? You're losing pandemics and childhood mortality and all sorts of great lose, those things, and it's after. Maybe then find other ways of incorporating practices and experiences that will give us a sense of competence, a sense of purpose, that will bring communities together rather than isolating individuals, that will not make us mere consumers. And, of course, we'd be, at this point, sort of resisting a lot of the underlying logic of modern economies, which find increasing ways to make us dependent on their goods and services, even beyond just satisfying basic goods needs and providing for basic goods. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, particularly again on the front of human desire and the, the kind of experiences that we are offered, and whether they are as rich as we imagine them to be lots of really dense and interesting ideas there.
Kenny Primrose:Your point about the logics of the world at the moment are not going to be the way to to deal with our on we or whatever, because they're only driving us in one direction. Arguably, it feels like we're moving towards universal basic income and having our work lives taken over and, um, yeah, it's a significant conversation to be had around what that would do for us to have our work removed. But where do you find reasons to be hopeful within our current context? Because there's one way of looking at things that's quite bleak. You can see where everything is headed. It's got very stubborn logic to it. The people who hold believers don't seem like they've got any interest in changing them. How, yeah, how can communities ask this question on a bigger scale?
Michael Sacasas:Yeah, that's a great question and one I've inevitably asked for some version of it. Yeah, I think my impulse is to sort of bracket the question of scale to some degree. I don't know, and I wouldn't presume to say this is how the world will be saved. Now there are enormous issues of immense scale confronting us in various guises and dimensions, right, and so if you do see the whole apparatus of society bent in one way, it's hard to imagine how does it get turned around? And invariably, I find myself wanting to say well, one. There's a question of timeframe. How long would it take to do that? What is the timeframe in which we're thinking when we ask the questions? What is to be done? And maybe we just need to extend our horizons and think about things in terms of generations. Right, returning the ship, as it were, in terms of generations. That's part of it. But I think you has to. I don't see how it doesn't start at some level with choices that individuals and families and communities at a human scale are going to make differently. Now, if you ask me, what do I see that is hopeful, or where is there hope? I think part of it is that there is at least it seems to me a growing conversation around these sorts of questions, a growing willingness to question whether this, as Mumford put it back in the 1960s, this magnificent bribe, was in our best interest, whether there are not some ways in which we ought to refuse the bribe. Just becoming aware of how this technological infrastructure shapes us, of how this technological infrastructure shapes us this is something where I think I've seen a huge shift in public consciousness, even in the 10 to 15 years that I've been writing about these questions, where people do not just necessarily assume that all new technology is going to be good and beneficent and helpful to them, is going to be good and beneficent and helpful to them, and so I think it begins with a more critical attitude, more critical thinking about the nature of the technological milieu and then beginning to make more informed and constructive choices. I think there's been a lot of conversation, at least here in the US side of things, about smartphones of late. Maybe it's been going on for a while, I feel it's been going on for a while, but I think it's saturated the cultural conversation a little bit more. I think Jonathan Haidt's recent book has had a lot to do with it, and so I think this is good.
Michael Sacasas:I think we should something about the way that we come to feel tethered to this particular device, for instance, that many of us feel intuitively is off or disordered. So we begin to sense like, oh, there are consequences. These are not just neutral tools, it's not just another way to make a phone call right, there's something else going on here. I should think about it. I should think about what limits I might want to put on it. Some people may decide they don't want this instrument to be a part of their lives anymore, right? So just that consciousness of the power of certain tools and technologies, whether they're devices or systems, to think more critically about it and to be prepared to say no, a refusal, or to better negotiate the terms on which we allow these devices into our lives.
Michael Sacasas:To the degree that we have agency, right, to the degree that we have agency and I think again, to make sure to make this point, not everyone has the same degree of agency the freedom to make these kinds of choices, even in small ways in their lives. So we should, in whatever way possible, make it so that increasing number of people are able to make these choices. There are those that will pursue solutions or regulation at the governmental level, that's fine. My thinking is always for the individual who is going to wake up tomorrow morning and with regards to his or her life, personal life, the life of his or her family, their small community, we'll have choices to make and we'll not be able to wait for the next round of legislation or for the tech companies to wake up and become more conscious about their harms or whatever. That's not, right now, the way forward.
Michael Sacasas:So, to empower individuals to make choices, but to lead with the good, to say, I'm always saying by how the plot of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 begins, with the protagonist being asked are you happy? And it's a very powerful question Are things going well for you? And there are many reasons why they may not be, obviously. But if we look around and say, I'm the sort of person that has a relatively decent job, sheltered, I have basic needs, but I'm not happy, what is off that willingness to think through the good life, the question of the good life, and to now recognize that your technological kit, if you will, is a part of that conversation and that we need to be more reflective about it. That more people are coming to that place, I think, is the beginning of what might be a larger kind of cultural shift that might just take a good bit of time to play out be a larger kind of cultural shift that might just take a good bit of time to play out.
Kenny Primrose:I hope you're right and I definitely noticed the same kind of thing. Ivan Illich, you quote him as saying hospitality is where he finds hope. I was curious to know more. There's something very interesting about that as a kind of statement.
Michael Sacasas:The face-to-face encounter, learning that we're all human again. There's so many dimensions to the things that are not well with us as a society. Part of it is the way that social media over the past decade has mediated our perception of the other and there, in particular, thinking about just a face-to-face encounter being just very powerful and necessary. Because when we're mediated by social media and we see the worst and most outrageous elements of what we think of as our political other, our cultural other, it's very easy to construct a false picture, a false and unhelpful and destructive picture of the social body. And I was thinking of this even when you were talking about about the jane jacobs thing, about those little micro encounters that we have when we live on a city block and we see the same people over and over.
Michael Sacasas:We don't know them very well, but we know them. They're distinct people, they're different than us, and there's something humanizing about the total effect of those kinds of encounters yeah, weak ties, I think psychologists call them the important weak ties.
Kenny Primrose:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a not insignificant part of life, I think.
Michael Sacasas:Yeah, it was when you were talking about food and how you can order a whole meal. Never leave your house right. You don't even have to see the person who delivers it anymore. Here, at least, the habit is that somebody will knock on your door and then you open the door. The food's there? Seen a single human being that's involved in the process of preparing that, or nothing. And those encounters. I think that we're increasingly outsourcing so that the only people we ever see are the people within our affinity group. We lose all the kind of virtues and skills required to relate to others who are not like us. I think that's a big deal.
Kenny Primrose:It's a huge deal. I think it was Helena Norberg-Hodges a nice line she. She said our arms have grown so long that we don't see what our hands are doing anymore and that kind of detachment and disconnection is. Yeah, it's a moral thing, right? Yeah, definitely, jean twenge her work on generation. She points out that technology is the driver in generational shift.
Kenny Primrose:It would be interesting to think of whether a generation might grow up after us who actually are defined by their refusal to engage in certain types of technology. I wonder, from your knowledge, is there precedent for technology? Actually the Luddites smashing up their what was it? Their sewing machines or whatever, and obviously they failed in technology in an inexorable march forward to go over. Is there? Are there? Are there any cases that you can think of where actually people have said this is not good for us, this piece of technology and efficiency and whatever, and we're going to reject it? Obviously you have communities like the amish who are the poster boys of this, but on mass such that it doesn't achieve some kind of hegemonic dominance in the way we do life, or are we looking for a world first here?
Michael Sacasas:Yeah. So I think the Luddite example is interesting, because it's always telling to me when Luddite is used as a kind of casual slur of somebody right, they're such a Luddite, but meant pejoratively, with the idea being that these are just people that hate technology, right, but I think we know the case is that it wasn't the technology per se right, it was the way they were being de-skilled and economically deprived. They might have been fine with an arrangement of introducing these new technologies in a way that still honored their labor and allowed them to provide for their families, et cetera. I don't want to pass over the Amish too quickly, though, also because here's the and this goes back to the previous question that you asked me in my long-winded answer which is just the realization that we have to ask some questions, right.
Michael Sacasas:I think, about 10 years ago I wrote a little post about how the Amish are. I call it the tech-savvy Amish and they got to this place faster than the majority of the population. Right and again, their distinctive characteristic isn't that they reject technology. Their distinctive characteristic is that they're willing to operate. They're not just trying to freeze life in the late 19th century, they're trying to preserve a certain form of life for themselves that they value, trying to preserve a certain form of life for themselves that they value, and they're not willing to just throw it out the window because somebody has a new device that they want to sell. And so they have a kind of communally instituted process of weighing whether it's going to be good to introduce a new technology or not. They have people who we might think of as early adopters, and they may deploy this technology in a limited way to evaluate it and then, as a community, decide whether to enthusiastically accept this new technology, accept it but with very clearly defined limits or whether to refuse it. And so it's that willingness to think through and not just adopt first, ask questions later, often when it's too late that I think it is a model for us, and in part because, again, I'm thinking I'm most familiar with sort of the American psyche, right, the American culture and technologies place in it. America has been a very techno-friendly culture. Right, we have a great deal of faith this is probably broadly true of Western nations but we have a lot of faith in new technology. I think that the default has been to think that of course, a new technology is good and it's going to be good without complications. And so it didn't occur to people to think right, there always have been. There's a minority position. You can find it maybe in some of the romantics in the early 19th century, the arts and crafts movement. Both in the UK and here I think there are people who have said hold on, there's a way of life that is at risk here, that there's maybe something good in preserving, there's something inhuman about these new arrangements. But I think the majority has always been very enthusiastic and has not recognized the need to even think. The fact that many of us are now recognizing that need that we ought to think. One of the framings that I think is very helpful about the introduction of smartphones over the last I don't know 10, 12, 15 years, particularly for small children, is that we basically ran a society-wide experiment, but without the consent of those that we were experimenting on, because that is the nature of the impact of these tools. Maybe a willingness never to do that again, right? Or maybe the recognition within some critical mass of the society that recognizes that wasn't a good thing to do, it wasn't a wise thing to do. That itself, I think, is grounds for hope. So you know when people are, I hear people answer a similar question to this.
Michael Sacasas:One example they push, they point to in recent years, within the last decade, is the example of Google Glass. This year was a company that developed this, these glasses you may remember, like circa 2012, 13 maybe, and there was a pretty strong reaction to it. Right, there was a cultural pushback against it and maybe the argument is oh, these simply failed because they hadn't reached the requisite level of technological sophistication. I know there's Facebook and Ray-Ban, I believe, have been issuing some similar sorts of glasses, augmented glasses that maybe are making better inroads, but that collapse of that Google Glass project, when there was so much talk about how inevitable this was. This is the future. I remember in particular. I think it was the CEO of Evernote at the time saying in five years, it'll seem barbaric to live without these things. Of course that's the rhetoric of people who have something to sell. But that's maybe one recent case where what some people described as an inevitable technological progression was refused.
Michael Sacasas:But by and large, I would say it's only in the timescale of human history, only recently maybe, that we've learned that we ought to think these things through Now. That doesn't mean that we have great publics in place, places of public discourse to adjudicate. This is the advantage of the Amish to have relatively small scale communities with deliberative processes. We may not have those, may need to find a what's the word? I'm looking for a scale of community where we can make these choices. Maybe the school right, the local school board is one, maybe the church is one, maybe the neighborhood is another right when we can have meaningful input, feedback, communal decision-making, because if it's just the individual in the corporation or the individual in the state, then then yeah, it's hard to see how we have any leverage there. But if we can find smaller scale human organizations where there can be a process of deliberation, choice and in a community that comes together against a shared vision of the good life, I think that that would be the way forward life.
Kenny Primrose:I think that that would be the way forward. That's really helpful. I wonder if I can draw together some of the some of the strands of our conversation. We've been exploring this question of what is good for people to do, even if it can be done by a machine, and the question has raised up questions about what do we mean by good it? It's not just efficient. Yes, the product is the way you're formed by doing it. The additional goods that come with the process, and pausing to reflect like what's being lost, is crucial in this. I wonder, as you apply this question to your own life and you have young children, this question to your own life and you have young children are there practices or habits that you have instituted that are a way of living out this question?
Michael Sacasas:that's a great question and to affirm, yeah, that. What is the good? Or even I didn't make this very clear in the essay that I wrote, or I should have spent more time with it when I invited us to echo mumford's rallying cry life cannot be delegated. What do we mean by life? What sort of life, right, what kind of life? That's an important question to ask, and I recognize as well. Is that because you're asking what, for many people, ultimately, are deeply moral questions or philosophical?
Michael Sacasas:or religious and obviously they're going to be competing narratives and claims about what that life entails, and I think that's why the smaller scale community is an important context in which we can ask those questions right, because my answer may not be the answer that others may give, and that's an important component of this In my case. So I think about when I talk to cases where I might be invited to speak to parents about this, or a parent just happens to ask me what do you do For kids? They're worried, often they're worried, and often they're worried that their kids are spending too much time on a screen or something like that.
Michael Sacasas:It was kind of an inchoate worry, but not unjustified, and I think the first thing I want to say was what is the good that you're after? We should lead with the good was you, but it's the good that you're after right, that we should lead with the good. I think it's just good practice in general, right To not simply say I feel this is bad, I want to limit this, I want to react.
Michael Sacasas:It's reactionary in a sense, right when instead I think we will, and also for children, I would say this is less than helpful because it just feels arbitrary. There's just this thing that mom and dad don't let me do, or whatever the case may be. But if we can say these are the good, the beautiful things that we want, these are the things that will instill virtue or a high degree of real enjoyment, fulfillment Again, those are contested things, right, but something I try to do is not some well, one way of looking at it is not, you know, what are we cutting out, although there is some of that, but what are we doing? What are we being intentional to do? So to get outdoors right, to be out in the world and this is depending on where you live can be a little challenging. I'm fortunate in that it doesn't take a ton of work for me to get out to a place where we're going to be in the midst of trees, walking on a trail, encountering flora and fauna in interesting ways. It's been important to me to learn the names of these things in particular, so that I don't just point and say, oh, there are some trees or here are some birds, but to be able to recognize, to name, to tie closely together this web of attention and consciousness and language, and I think this is empowering for people as they become more familiar with the world that is their home. So I try to do this for myself. I did not grow up I grew up in the city by and large, and this is not part of my upbringing. I'm having to learn and then impart this to my own children. I think the pace of whether we're driven by efficiency, because we have crammed so much into our lives that we have to operate like a machine, as a household, in order to make it work. So this sometimes entails just saying no to certain opportunities or to weighing them and to not assuming that more is always better.
Michael Sacasas:With regards to our family life, having times of quiet, encouraging that to some degree, reading a lot, as I described earlier, taking this time to prepare a meal together, I think is important to become a little ritual in my household. I think it's something that will bear a lot of fruit in important ways. So the gist of all of these is to ask what are the good things that we want? And then I can say how does spending this much time on a device help us with that right? Or how does a certain tool or device or practice is it going to actually help us get these good things that we want for ourselves, that we know, feed our relationships, feed our commitment to our neighbors, to the world, help us know or enjoy the world?
Michael Sacasas:And if we find that the tool, the device, it's not conducive to those ends, we can say maybe that's not something we need, it's not something we need, it's not something we want. So obviously there's a kind of dense network of these sorts of questions and judgments that touch on all sorts of dynamics within a household. But that's a small glimpse of how I try to think about these things. What are the things that will really nurture my relationship with my children and their relationship with the world and with others? And how can we at the very least not let our tools get in the way of that or circumvent it? But how can we?
Kenny Primrose:if there are tools that will help us do that better, then we embrace those michael, I'm so appreciated, especially ending on these really practical, concrete bits of advice, but there's a huge amount in what you've said and what you write about on your Substack that I think is provoking people like me to pause and think about how we interact with technology and that question what is the good that we seek? So I'm massively grateful for that. Is there anything that you'd like to plug?
Michael Sacasas:Yeah, I think the sub stack is where I do most of my writing and thinking and it's an important part of my work. Folks will check that out. That'd be great. But thank you, I appreciate the kind words and honestly I do think just if all that results from my writing is that people are just thinking a little bit more deeply about these questions, that's good in my view.
Kenny Primrose:It certainly serves me and I know it serves many others. So yeah, thank you for your work with that. Michael, thank you so much for giving up an hour of your time or so. It's very generous of you.
Michael Sacasas:Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, happy to do it, great conversation.
Kenny Primrose:And that almost concluded my conversation with Michael Sikassas, though I did sneak in one last question before signing off and stopping the recording. I think his answer here is worth including. And finishing on Ivan Illich. You quote him as saying hospitality is where he finds hope. I was curious to know more. There's something very interesting about that as a kind of statement.
Michael Sacasas:The face-to-face encounter, learning that we're all human again to recognize that because there's so many dimensions to the things that are not well with us as a society. Part of it is the way that social media over the past decade has mediated our perception of the other and there in particular, thinking about just a face-to-face encounter being just very powerful and necessary. Because when we're mediated by social media and we see the worst and most outrageous elements of what we think of as our, our political other, our cultural other, it's very easy to construct a false picture, a false and unhelpful and destructive picture of the social body. And I was thinking of this even when you were talking about about the jane jacobs thing, about those little micro encounters that we have when we live on a city block and we see the same people over and over.
Michael Sacasas:We don't know them very well, but we know them. They're distinct people, they're different than us, and there's something humanizing about the total effect of those kinds of encounters yeah, weak ties, I think psychologists weak ties.
Michael Sacasas:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a not insignificant part of life, I think yeah, it was when you were talking about food and how you can order a whole meal. Never leave your house, right, it gets to. You don't even have to see the person who delivers it anymore. Here at least, the habit is that somebody will knock on your door and then you open the door. The food's there. You haven't seen a single human being that's involved in the process of preparing that or nothing. And those encounters. I think that we're increasingly outsourcing so that the only people we ever see, the people we are within our affinity group we lose all the kind of virtues and skills required to relate to others who are not like us.
Kenny Primrose:I think In an age of loneliness and tribalism, it's hard to overstate the value and need for hospitality in helping us to connect with and humanize those living in our communities who we barely know. One thing that machines will never be able to do for us is create human connections and communities. It takes people to do that. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this conversation with Michael Tsikassas. I really valued his insights and certainly will be thinking more carefully about the values that are at stake when I'm tempted to hand over human tasks to machines. Next week I'll be in conversation with the influential psychologist Peter Gray. In a conversation with some overlapped last week's episode with Michaeline Duclef, we'll be discussing what the conditions are for healthy psychological development and why they are so lacking in today's culture.
Peter Gray:The question has always been stimulated, in part by my observation that over the course of my lifetime, beginning in the early 1950s until now, we have seen a continuous decline in children's mental well-being. Obviously, we are doing a poorer job with every decade in supplying for children what they need to develop well psychologically. And so what do we need to do? How do we do a better job? What are we doing now differently than was done in the 1950s, when children, by every measure, were far happier, far healthier psychologically than they are today?
Kenny Primrose:You can find out Peter Gray's perspective on that next week. Until then, I wish you all well. Thank you very much for listening. As ever, all your reviews, comments, listens, emails are much appreciated. Best wishes.