Old Models

This year, FPR hosted a student essay contest. We received some excellent submissions, and we’re running the top three essays this week, timed to coincide with Wendell Berry’s 91st birthday. Here is the third-place essay.

My final and perhaps my best reason for not owning a 
computer is that I do not wish to fool myself...

–Wendell Berry, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” 1987

There was no “before the computer” for me. There are recordings on my father’s old video recorder of me as a child, with my elbows on the table and my face cupped in my hands, staring at the screen of a desktop PC. Watching this, I wish that I had gotten up, had said something, had even just looked in my father’s direction. But that is what there is. No amount of wishful thinking or rationalizing can redeem that.

In the quote above from “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” Mr. Berry states his strongest argument against bringing a computer into his home, and this is that he does not want to fool himself. It was this line of his essay that most arrested my attention. His “best” reason was not that the computer is an insidious sucker of souls (however true this may be), an argument based on fear for the future. His reason is that he does not want to be pressured into self-deception. What is compelling about this line of thought is that perhaps the choice not to have a computer is less an anxiety about what it might do to the cognitive functions of the brain or the sharpness of the eyes (though of course that is not to say it is not doing dreadful things), and more a choice not to play pretend.

With this concept of “fooling himself,” the argument runs that since he does not believe that writing is done “better” on a computer—the evidence being that there has not yet been a digital Dante, and specifically, one whose writing is superior because of the computer on which he wrote—he sees no “scientific” reason to have one. It is interesting to note, however, that this must not be Mr. Berry’s truly final reason for not owning a computer, because he says that if someone did write something better than Dante as a direct result of writing it on a computer, he would “speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice,” but, he adds, “I still will not buy one.” Perhaps, in the language of fooling oneself, he would still somehow be an unbeliever—and that is the crux of it. He will not get a computer because he does not believe.

In Mr. Berry’s terms, the definition of a self-inflicted fool appears to be this: he is someone who believes that the new machine has the power to make that aspect of the human experience which we call writing easier and better. If the human experience maintains any kind of continuity, I doubt any tool could do this. One lurking danger of playing the fool is that for a long time this delusion will be sufficient to keep supercharging itself. It will not be questioned, and, when, as recounted at the beginning, years and decades later the realization hits a person that what he has been doing has been sapping him of something good, it will of course be too late. He will have to remember about himself what I do in that image of myself at the computer: a stupid and silent faith that this replacement, entirely because it is such an easy one, has not in fact made it better. There are some things—entertaining a child, writing—that are not improved by being made superficially easy.

Of what the computer is a replacement is an interesting question. Mr. Berry calls it the “old model,” and explains that for him, the old model is “my wife, my critic, my closest reader, my fellow worker. . . . In order to be technologically up-to-date as a writer, I would have to sacrifice an association that I am dependent upon and that I treasure.” It occurred to me that technological advancement is really a sacrificial ritual: there is no change for the better without loss of something valuable. For those of us too young to have existed when the computer was something which could be ignored, the sacrifice was not a decision we got to make. Some of us are now searching for the “old models,” the things the computer has replaced, and I suspect that the reason for this is that the answer gained in the sacrifice was not an entirely satisfying one.

Along these lines, Mr. Berry’s ninth “standard for technological innovation” is that “It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists.” I wonder, though, how this is not a contradiction in terms. The concept of the old model implies that technological change is sacrifice, a loss of some kind, when he writes, “It is well understood that technological innovation always requires the discarding of the ‘old model’” (emphasis added). And yet his standard for technological innovation is that it does not replace or disrupt anything good. Is there a technology which meets this standard? More specifically, is there any technological innovation which discards an old model that was completely bad? If this is never the case, then, in order not to replace or disrupt anything good, nothing must change.

With the societal acquiescence to the computer, there was an old model of some sort—an old model not just of writing but of living—which quietly gave way for it. It is increasingly clear that there was, in the old model which the computer has replaced and disrupted, something good that was lost. But Mr. Berry’s nine standards seem to amount to a satire (albeit an effective one) on technological change. This standard of technological innovation, which demands that the new machine in addition to being smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient, neither replace nor disrupt anything, is in effect a rejection of technological advancement. It stops time or tries to rewind it. It is a shame for us that time progresses, since all change is effectively change for the worse. It is interesting that Mr. Berry’s essay begins with the words, “Like almost everybody else, I am hooked.” He finishes the sentence with, “to the energy corporations,” but the sentence would be as suitably finished for me with, “to the computers, which I do not admire.”

We face paralysis. It is quite probably true that as far as technological innovation is concerned, there is nothing for us but loss in the slipstream. For those of us who grew up with computers, Mr. Berry locates all that is desirable and meaningful behind us.

Image Credit: Winslow Homer, “Girl With Hay Rake” (1878) via rawpixel.