Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [77]
The nicest thing, he went on, was that aside from avoiding the risk of foreclosure, such sharing saved the cost of interest. “That’s the only way to do it,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to bear down every month to meet those payments.”
I admitted I was under pressure myself to pay back college loans.
“Was it all worth it?” The words came out of the blue. His candor took my breath away. Our eyes met, and big knowing smiles spread across our faces. He seemed to be intimating to me that something in my educational background was ersatz, irrelevant to who I really was. I felt exposed, yet at the same time somehow understood, gently protected, as if I were cupped within those big hands…Wilbur thought I was a turkey.
There was more to this fellow than met the eye. He was not merely wry. He was also a bit sly.
The next time I saw him, he smiled and shook his finger, saying:
He who studies, studies, studies
And does not practice what he knows
Is like one who plows, plows, plows
And never sows.
He delivered the lines in a tone of mock chastisement.
“I couldn’t resist,” he chuckled shamefacedly.
The ribbing had more justification than I would have liked to admit. To most Minimites, in my practical inexperience I must have appeared to be a doddering product of the sort of specialized education that their whole way of life came into being to rectify. I could only plead guilty to the charge.
They might have been even more scandalized to learn that one of my favorite philosophers, Aristotle, openly disdained practical labors and relegated them to slaves. (Not that I agreed with this particular part of his teaching.) True to his own theories, Aristotle was said to sit all day in his chair, deep in thought, holding a brass ball in his hand. Whenever he started to doze, the ball would slip from his fingers, waking him. If only he had carried the idea a degree further…Even unschooled Minimites like Cornelius realized it was possible to think while working with one’s hands—in fact, doing so provided a steadier stimulus than the occasionally falling ball. Aristotle himself, for heaven’s sake, in his philosophical writings, elegantly described the seamlessness of the human body and mind. But he kept dropping the ball.
If advanced education gave me an advantage over my teasing companion, it was probably an in-depth understanding of why he was the wiser. The story, which I might be able to piece together from all my graduate studies, goes something like this: Long after Aristotle’s ancient aristocracy, but before today’s technocracy, an unusual movement arose that was utterly destructive of classical intellectual pretensions. It was Christianity, and its peculiar power was an odd virtue it promulgated: humility. This new religion, as Lynn White Jr. says, presented “a strange and difficult standard. In the eyes of God, it taught, all men from the mightiest king to the humblest peasant are equal.” The medieval monk became “the first intellectual to get dirt under his fingernails. In his very person, he destroyed the old artificial barrier between the empirical and the speculative: the manual and the liberal arts.”
White argues that, ironically enough, these practical-minded egalitarians were the first true technologists. Monks, unlike ancient patricians, did not feel it beneath them to experiment in the workshop in search of new and better ways to get the day’s work done. Yet the technology they created was benign; it harmonized with human society and nature. What could be more promising? The monk was Christianity’s version of Aristotle: a kinder, earthier, more practical intellectual.
But he soon became more like Aristotle. This was one intervening step White (who goes on to blame the environmental crisis on Christianity) might have clarified: formerly lowly experimenters became bookish and aloof. They relegated