Efficiency
is based on the notion that if you have to do something, you might as well find
a way of doing it in the quickest most frictionless way possible. On one level, it means you end up having more
time and energy to do the other things you have to do. Within a business context, savings in time
and energy means savings in money. Less
fuel is used and machines and humans have time to do more tasks. Modern industries are always looking for new
ways to increase efficiency. It is a
virtue that is enshrined in the modern work ethic.
Nevertheless,
something is gained and something is lost with our modern focus on
efficiency. What is lost is perhaps not
always immediately obvious. We can
perhaps explore more fully what is lost when we look at pre-industrial
traditional society. There, people do
not always look to perform their actions in the most efficient way.
In
most traditional societies, people do not tend to break up their actions a lot
into isolated defined discrete steps.
There is not a science to getting an action precisely right. Instead actions are performed as an organic
continual flow. Traditional society
actions are coherent, and there is an art to performing an action with
style. It is not simply a matter of
doing something right to achieve a particular goal at the end. The whole action performed as a flowing
continual cohesive unity is a goal in and of itself. There is an art to fishing, an art to
hunting, an art to gardening and to planting crops, an art to making implements
and other necessary accessories of life.
In
a modern mechanical action, the focus is on the mark left on the world at the
end of the action in the form of a discrete product or service. In a traditional organic action, the focus is
on the imprint left on a person’s field of experience throughout the whole
course of the action. The journey of the
action is as important as the destination in terms of human validation. When one is looking for efficiency in
actions, the journey of the action is of secondary importance and the only
source of human validation is the quality of the mark at the destination of the
mechanical action, the quality of the product or service.
There
is something else that distinguishes the actions of traditional people from
modern efficient actions. A traditional
action is actually several different actions with several different ends. There is the ostensive dominant sub-action
within the action. The sub-action which
triggered the action process in the first place. A group of men decide to go hunting for game
to bring their tribe some meat. Going
hunting for meat is the dominant sub-action for each man in the group. However,
interspersed with going on the hunt is the need for socialization. While on their way to the hunting ground, the
hunters talk, making and receiving imprints from each other in the
conversation. On a larger level, there
is rooting themselves in the camaraderie of a group, feeling grounded in a
segment of the larger group of their village.
The hunt will create a preserved memory imprint in the mind of all the
hunters, a memory that will be discussed after the hunting action is done.
On
the way to the hunt, prayers or offerings can be made to the gods in order to
have a good hunt. Each hunt is not just
an attempt to find food. It creates a
disturbance in the activity of the cosmos which must be dealt with
properly. If not, the hunt will not be
successful. The hunt makes and preserves
a larger cosmological imprint than simply killing an animal or animals. It affects the balance of nature; it creates
a shift within the hunters’ field of experience.
Hunting
is in and of itself not necessarily an efficient way of obtaining meat. An animal has to be followed patiently for a
period of time, before the hunters are in a position to kill the animal. And sometimes, the animal escapes. Hunting is a true test of skill for each of
the hunters. It becomes a way of
validating himself as an adult male member of his tribe and as a provider for
his family. Hunting for meat requires
skill, patience and care more than efficiency.
Hunting
not only leads to the defined discrete survival of people as figure biological
organisms. It leads to the more nebulous
flowing continual survival through grounded group interaction and to the
internal flowing continual psychological survival through a successful
demonstration of the art of using hunting implements and to the larger external
flowing continual cosmological survival through an embracing grounded
integration in the larger scheme of nature and the spirit world. Efficiency strips an action of any other
meaning other than arriving at a focused goal.
Efficiency turns an action into a temporally-defined figure floating in
a vacuum.
The
point is that a lived life is more than constantly taking the straightest path
from point a to point b. And yet that is
what a machine does. But a machine does
not have to satisfy a need to feel alive.
Even a complex robot cannot be construed to have an organic cohesive
consciousness the way a human would have.
All of the many different operations to move a robot in different ways or
to make it analyze or speak do not add up to consciousness.
And
frankly, the quick frictionless movements of efficiency are not very
stimulating for a human. A person loses
his connection to himself, to the people around him and to his living
environment, when he is at his most efficient.
He doesn’t feel the stimulation of the journey of the action flowing
within him.
Put
another way, what point is there for a person to reach a destination, if he is
unable to experience reaching the destination.
And he is not likely to experience reaching the destination, if he is
unable to experience the journey that takes him to the destination. A person has to be able to experience where
he has been – his temporal grounding – in order to fully experience where he is
arriving. Making and preserving organic
imprints is a flowing process, not simply disconnected points in time.
But,
some will say, we are living in a modern technological society built on
machines and computers and robots, and we can’t simply get rid of them, or we
will have a complete societal breakdown.
And we need the efficiency built on this modern infrastructure, or our
society will become dysfunctional.
My
answer is that I am not trying to get rid of this machine infrastructure, but
to minimize its influence, particularly among those people who are beginning to
feel bothered by modern technology’s pervasive influence. If people can understand that there is more
that is potentially available in the journey of a human action than simply the
possibility of attaining an end goal efficiently, they will become less
obsessed with efficiency. They will
start focusing on psychological, social, environmental and cosmological
grounding; creating good flowing complex actions; making, preserving and
receiving good organic imprints; having rich vibrant experiences and ultimately
preparing for death. And focusing on
these ideas will prevent people from sliding into machinehood or computerhood
or robothood. Too much efficiency
diminishes our capacity for human experience. Too much efficiency very simply
diminishes our capacity to be human.
(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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