Mountains acting like mountains fulfill their purpose.
What should humans do to re-establish communication with the voices of Earth?
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The relationship with the earth is completely mediated by the technological world. But the traditional word for technique, techné , has nothing to do with this omnipresent system that conditions our perception today.
Techné translates as art or artisan technique. The personal relationship that is established between the person and their tool transforms both, creating a language, close to poetry, that shapes materials according to inspiration. Being inspired is synonymous with being connected to the spirit. It is the spirit that guides the hand of the craftsman when his work is not subject to a rhythm imposed by industrial production.
Dialogue with the earth, like any authentic dialogue, is only possible under conditions of respect and recognition . There is no dialogue possible without renouncing power over the earth. Recovering the balance between giving and receiving is a law of life, as so many traditional wisdoms remind us.
“Man dwells poetically on earth,” said Holderlin in the 18th century, in one of the most beautiful attempts to revolutionize knowledge and life. German Romanticism was one of the high points of the human revolt against the insensitivity towards nature. The euphoric spirit that accompanied those young philosophers and poets who saw the birth of a new culture, a new mythology founded on beauty, goodness and truth, gives us perspective for interpreting the present.
Inspired by classical Greek culture, they revived the tragedy of maintaining the tension between the finite human condition and the equally human experience of infinity. They saw the growth of a quantifiable science that was laying the foundations of an era where the sacred would gradually be relegated to places of worship, within human psychology, and where technology would eclipse the perception of a world full of divinities and a wild, that is, undomesticated, nature.
The Greek word poiesis means poetry but also production . The constant emergence from the depths of life, from physis , understood as the dynamic forces that act within rivers and mountains. Nature is a generating force, constantly dynamic, of which our action is part. What does a poetic production mean to us? A technique connected to the spirit, to the mystery? Is this the next revolution?
The persistent myth
The debate about technology and its effects is very old. In fact, human temptations to design life have been a motif in literature and myths for as long as we can remember.
The dream of transcending the human condition through knowledge that allows us to dominate nature has marked our history, being the main characteristic of Western culture since the 12th century.
Technoscientific arrogance reaches unimaginable extremes in the struggles to disqualify lines of research stigmatized as unreliable because they do not share the same methods or the same reading of reality. The famous dispute between Newton and Goethe is still found in the disqualifications we see when proposing alternative health methods.
It goes without saying that no technology is neutral or objective. Any new invention, any new exploration of the electromagnetic fields that we share with all living beings on earth, for example, should be meditated and considered in pluralistic thinking tables.
The digitalization of human life is already present and the loss of freedoms and privacy is a fact. Prestigious intellectuals speak of transhumanism as a desirable and inevitable step.
At the origin of the mythical faith in technology there is an internal disagreement that prevents us from fully maturing. We delegate happiness, fulfillment, liberation or salvation, to another being, a lifestyle, a specialist or another world. Always something that we lack. We reduce the relationship with life, knowledge and the earth to relationships, not of equitable exchange, but of calculation of benefits. The human mind is impregnated with the technological pattern, understood as the internal division between subject and object and the consequent manipulation of reality. This internal attitude is reflected and institutionalized, as David Loy says, in an economic or political system, but the key to getting out of it is to fully assume the human condition.
We are asked to be honest to connect with the voices of the earth. Not calculation or manipulation. We are asked to overcome this internal displacement that has been curdling based on years of a competitive education, based on comparison with others and contempt for oneself. Which has been constellating a dwarfed psychology where survival is measured in terms of being more than the other. This dualism is the true core of the technical, spiritual and cognitive revolution.
From Eastern wisdom comes to us the notion of an action that does not act. That is, of a way of doing that has previously dissolved the ego , the sense of separation from the other. Whether this other is a person, a tool or an action. It seems paradoxical and perhaps impossible, to act without intention, to act as if the action were the only important thing and at the same time with detachment towards its results. But in this inner margin of freedom a great change occurs. A small margin where inner sovereignty resides.
From these and other non-modern cultures come to us very different ways of relating to technique . A dialogue between the person and the wood, the brush or the clay in which both merge, giving rise to a unique work, the result of the moment, of a state of mind, expressing an ephemeral and at the same time permanent relationship between the person and nature.
As wood is reduced to a material to be built on the basis of a prior calculation of profits and industrial production is put into operation, the relationship is completely transformed. Technique becomes technology and the living spark that speaks to the craftsman fades under the repetition of a mechanical pattern.
The beauty of a work of art is not measured by an aesthetic canon, relative to the times, but according to its capacity to show truth. According to the commotion it awakens in the one who contemplates it. This is how the ancients saw it, also in Greece, where beauty , good and truth were different names of the divinity. What does this triad say to us today and how can we link it to the necessary transformation of technological society?
In the 1970s, the environmental movement exploded and with it emerged intelligent voices critical of industrialization. The green movements represented a period of hope in the change of the production model. The reality, however, is that the green revolution remains stuck in the demand for energy without addressing the central issue: a change in worldview .
How to discern between emancipatory techniques, techniques that free people from heavy burdens by opening up new spaces for exploration, and techniques that are dictated by a global market that seeks to increase the number of submissive consumers around the world?
It was Ivan Illich, one of the most lucid critics of industrial society, who set clear criteria between emancipatory techniques and enslaving technologies . The difference lies above all in the scale, but also in the personal relationship that is established with the work tool. From a certain limit, he said, a specific threshold for each technique, the objective for which it had been created is perverted, giving the opposite result to what was intended.
Everything that is too big, that tends towards gigantism goes against human autonomy, and instead of making us freer, it enslaves us, going against the supposed true advantage of civilization: Being freer, more conscious and with a greater capacity to live fully.
The human scale is not only a calculation relative to habitable space, but also to the pace that matches our ability to perceive, understand and respond. The right dose of information that allows us to broaden our horizons, the sufficient amount of food that nourishes us, the right measure of desires and aspirations that brings us closer to fulfillment.
The planet asks us to reduce the impact of our invasive presence. Learning how much is enough is a maxim that comes to us from wisdoms from all continents. A motto that was very lucidly adopted by the degrowth movement.
We can only regain the power to live humanely on earth if we withdraw it from the large multinationals that run the economy and design our destiny. And following Gandhi’s recommendation, “keep productivity within the limits of necessity.”
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Techniques, then, that help us reduce gigantism . Tools that incorporate the human hand and remove excess automatisms. Coexistential techniques, as Illich said, that, through friendship , make us grow humanly.
We are in the middle of this mirage, enchanting for some, dark for others. Chemical and biomedical research laboratories that experiment without any scruples with animals, crossing species, with the approval of orthodox medical science. Experiments that contradict the intimate connection that exists between all that is alive and that open the doors to imbalances of all kinds in living organisms.
We are very far from the sensitive and spiritual experience of artisans who dialogue with materials until they find their own unique and unrepeatable expression.
It is possible, however, a technique that does not impose a mechanical time on the reality it wants to know nor does it require extractive methodologies to get to the bottom of reality. A technique that follows the rhythms of the earth and rhythmically emancipates people from a system that ignores the meaning and human capacities to live well and to heal in community. A technique that generates spaces for human self-realization and the common good.
Questioning the myth that associates technology and freedom , opening a plural debate on appropriate techniques is a pending task. Getting rid of the idea that technology is synonymous with freedom and that every new mechanical device is a hope for eternity, that is, it will make us immune to the passage of time, is the veil that keeps us separated from the real regenerative and healing forces that we share with the earth.
We need a new myth where the human condition is fully recognized and accepted . And where we don’t have to constantly flee to outer space to find meaning in existence .
When we talk about technopoiesis we are referring to this way of doing things while being connected to the unity of life. Of relating to matter as an extension of our own body , from the awareness that matter is alive, born from unobservable backgrounds, common to all beings and therefore, is a window to knowledge.
Finally, with the myth, the image of rational and logical beings who can control the future will also fall. And nature will emerge that is related to the earth, the sensitivity that connects us with other non-human sensitivities, the feeling of well-being when we reduce the desire to be more and the mental acceleration that floods us.
And little by little, perhaps we will begin to resemble the silences of our grandparents, when in the midst of endless tasks they sat at the threshing floor, grateful to have arrived at dusk.
Text: Àngels Canadell