The
evolution of using things in the external world to obtain food goes back a long
way among animals. Many non-human
animals use pre-existing objects in their living environment. These consist primarily of twigs and
rocks. Twigs can be slightly modified
for tool purposes as when a chimpanzee uses a twig to fish out termites from a
termite nest. This modification of a twig would constitute a very minimal
imprint being made on an object by an animal.
There is not a significant imprint made on the object in its fabrication
as a tool. Furthermore, the products on
which these primitive tools are used are forms of food, not another object like
a craft product. The latter would
consist of a meaningful made imprint that is worthy of being preserved in and
of itself.
With
the appearance of humans on the planet, we get the first presence of things on
which a complex animal both makes and preserves significant imprints. Stones were struck against other stones to
make tools with edges, and these tools included hammers, hand axes, spear parts
and blades. Capuchin monkeys in Brazil
strike stones against other stones to produce stone flakes, but then they do
nothing with them. However, the broken
stones made by early humans were used as tools for basic survival functions
like hunting and preparing food. They
were not for the most part used at that point in human development to create
craft products with meaningful made and preserved imprints.
One
major exception of a prehistoric creative product was the cave paintings. These paintings were made with a combination
of rocks, shells, twigs, feathers, brushes of animal hairs and hollow bones to
achieve different effects on the walls.
Certainly, this represented an early attempt to make and preserve a
product imprint from at least some implements that were made and preserved to
be useful in the production of the painting.
For
the purposes of this article, the next span of history that we will talk about covers
a period of time that starts when prehistoric humans started to make cave
paintings and ends up at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It’s a long time period, but it represents an
ongoing pattern of dealing with human artifacts. This was a time when people increasingly
refined techniques to make and preserve imprints on tools so that these tools
could be used to help make and preserve imprints on products. Because there was no mass production by
machines, each tool and each product of the tools had an element of refined
craftsmanship. The person who made the
tools was making and preserving his own imprints on the world. Many times, the person who made the tools was
the person who made the products, but eventually, tools and products became
separate specializations. And because
the development of the artisan mentality meant that most people had to acquire
tools and products from other artisans, market economies were created to allow
for the exchange of goods, to allow for people to receive each other’s tool and
product imprints.
With
the start of the Industrial Revolution and mass production, a whole different
pattern of humans dealing with their artifacts emerged. Individual innovators designed the machines
that were used in the factories. These
inventors were the only people actually involved in making new original
imprints with regard to human artifacts.
The people who actually made tools and consumer products were the people
who operated the machines, worked on assembly lines, assembling parts to create
finished products. Each new factory
product created was a new affirmation of the inventor’s design, a new
presentation of the imprint the inventor wanted to make with his machine. With the creation of the factory system, all
the focus turned to the presentation of the established imprints of the
mechanical artifact makers. The imprints
of the relatively few innovators distinct from the work of the vast number of
factory workers. Something fundamental
had been lost by the factory workers – the opportunity to make and preserve
their own imprints through individually crafted artifacts. The focus in the factories shifted to how
much exchange value or money the factory workers could make in order to buy
other different consumer artifacts, other already preserved imprints. Making and preserving new individual imprints
among the workers got lost in the factory process. Only making and preserving already
established imprints and receiving other different established imprints
remained.
The
workers who participated in this system gave up something very important: an
important aspect of their self-worth.
But perhaps even more is going to be lost as the use of 3-D printers
starts to grow. These machines have the
capacity to make extremely complex artifacts with only the minimal intervention
of a worker who sets the process going.
On the one hand, it is true that in some situations a person can design
his own artifact, such as a child designing his own toy. And that, of course, sounds very creative and
very positive. But the designer is
totally separated from the process of constructing the artifact in the external
world. He is totally separated from the
process of physically making the imprint in the external world. There is no focus on his own craftsmanship. And a lot of people are just going to make a
partial imprint from their minds or none at all (if it is a standardized
artifact design) and then focus on the imprint they will receive when the 3D
printer is done with its operation. It
doesn’t matter if it’s a toy or a gun or a car or even a body organ. Increasingly, we are going to be moving into
an age of very passive consumerism, where our main connection to artifacts is
going to be based on receiving them.
Just a minimal participation in the process of constructing them if at
all.
Whereas
the process of constructing artifacts was an integral part of preindustrial
human participation in the field of experience in the external world, a process
that gave a person grounding in the external world, a process that allowed him
to feel fully alive and to prepare for death through the imprints he made and
preserved, today the average person is left in an experiential vacuum with
regard to the artifacts he uses. His primary
connection to artifacts is to take already constructed ones and to use
them. For the most part, he no longer
directly makes his tools with his hands, and he no longer directly makes his
products with tools. The exceptions are
a relatively few usually professional artisans – people who seem eccentric and
anachronistic in relation to the trends of modern life. Increasingly disappearing is the struggle to
put some order to one’s world through the use of basic tools and the creation
of other more basic artifacts.
Increasingly disappearing is the possibility of finding the sense of
purpose that comes with engaging in this struggle. We have traveled a long way in our evolution
from pre-industrial humans. The question
is if this long way has always been and will always continue to be a uniformly
good way.
(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow
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