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  • Technology as a Threat to Ordinary Human Life in Households Today
  • J. Cuddeback

I. Introduction

In I'll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the southern agrarians published in 1930, Andrew Lytle reflects on a great struggle ushered in by industrialization in America:

This conflict is between the unnatural progeny of inventive genius and men. It is a war to the death between technology and the ordinary functions of living. The rights to these human functions are the natural rights of man, and they are threatened now, in the twentieth, not in the eighteenth, century for the first time. Unless man asserts and defends them he is doomed, to use a chemical analogy, to hop about like sodium on water, burning up his own energy. But since a power machine is ultimately dependent on human control, the issue presents an awful spectacle: men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. This is, to follow the matter to its conclusion, a moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction.1

Lytle clearly has no doubt about the connection between technology and the progressive demise of ordinary functions of living. His assertion, and particularly the powerful formulation "ordinary functions of living," moved me to consider just what human functions are indeed ordinary and in what way they are threatened by the use of technology.

To begin to address this broad, difficult, and controverted topic, I will state a few points I will take as given in this essay:

  1. 1. There has been a significant shift in the customs and habits of living in the home in the last century or so. [End Page 70]

  2. 2. There is a temporal concomitance of these changes and the introduction and regular use of certain new technologies in the home.

  3. 3. A good number of actions that can reasonably be called "ordinary functions of living" have been either lost altogether or substantially reduced in home life.

  4. 4. The loss of such ordinary human functions represents a notable degradation in the quality of human life, and so in human happiness. Put otherwise, this change is definitively a negative one, even while there are concomitant, and essentially connected, positive changes.

While the first two propositions are perhaps empirically obvious, the latter two involve deeper judgments. In listing the latter among my "givens," I do not imply that they are self-evident or that everyone should take them as given. Rather, I simply indicate that these points will not be the focus of defense or explanation.

There is, of course, no set list of ordinary human functions. For the purpose of consideration here, I propose the following as an initial and partial list:

  1. 1. The manual labor intrinsically related to providing for human necessities, especially in the production, preparation, and consumption of food

  2. 2. Various actions in which two or more people are rationally and intentionally present to one another, especially conversation

  3. 3. Recreation, especially storytelling, song, and dance

  4. 4. Reading and a reflective habit of mind

  5. 5. Natural times of quiet, observation, and informal conversation

Here is my thesis: there is a causal connection between the extensive use of machine and computer technologies in the home and the demise of the ordinary functions of human living. Understanding this causal connection, or at least giving it due consideration, can provide a foundation for the defense or reestablishment and building up of these ordinary functions.

After considering some intrinsic difficulties in defending my thesis, I will lay out some basic principles of Aristotle's and Aquinas's understandings of the household. I will then consider the connection of technological changes and life within the household.

II. The Difficulty of This Topic

Philosophers, in my understanding, seek to give an account of what they discover in reality. In some cases, this is more difficult than in others. [End Page 71]

The effects of technology in the home provide a particularly interesting case. Certain things that I here call "effects" are obvious for all to see, such as that people spend less time sitting together on the porch or in the living room, or that there is less shared manual labor in the home. That this constitutes a...

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