This intuitive interest in materiality can help, in turn, to develop a healthy appreciation for human ingenuity. It also cultivates curiosity about the material world in general, the habit of wondering how pencils or pillows were made, and by whom. Experiencing a craftsperson at work, in person, is an incredible experience: it gives an immediate appreciation of the intimate choreography that real skill involves. And if you’re not particularly handy (I am not, myself) the next best thing is to watch someone who is. Knowledge of one craft or trade can inform an understanding of many others. Though one does not need to be a maker to have material intelligence, it certainly helps. If we can anchor ourselves in this way, attending closely to the objects near to us, we might just be able to regain our bearings, and take greater responsibility for our actions. Let’s try to recover our literacy in the ways of the physical world, just as someone who reads English can understand this sentence, and someone good with numbers can draw up a balanced budget. So what can be done about it? I have a modest proposal: let’s cultivate our material intelligence. But the more we trust it to be the binding agent for our society, the more fragmented we seem to become. Like any tool, technology in itself is not a bad thing.
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This gap between producers and consumers leads to a crack in the social fabric, where weeds of distrust and hatred can grow.
Scale and distance present consumers with related challenges: if you don’t know the people who were responsible for making the things in your life (and indeed, cannot imagine what their own lives might be like), it is difficult to find common cause with them. For the same reasons, corporations take little responsibility for their outsourced workers. If no one understands what is really happening, how can anyone be held responsible? This lack of transparency gives rise to a range of ethical dilemmas, chief among them our inability to address climate change, due in part to prevalent psychological separation from the processes of extraction, manufacture and disposal. Such automated decisionmaking is extremely efficient, but it has contributed to a crisis of accountability. These algorithms are themselves driven by algorithms, in a cascade of interconnected calculation. As Carl Miller argues in his book The Death of the Gods (2018), algorithms have taken over many day-to-day procedures. In effect, we are living in a state of perpetual remote control. It is partly a problem of scale: the wider the view comes, the harder it is to see clearly what’s close at hand. Nobody – not an assembly-line worker, not a CEO – has a comprehensive vantage point. This tends to obscure awareness of the extended production chains through which materials, tools, components and packaging are sourced.
Deepened knowledge usually also means narrowed knowledge.
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Because of the sheer complexity of contemporary production, even the people who do have professional responsibility for making things – the engineers and factory workers and chemists among us – tend to be specialists. Fewer and fewer do today, as commodities circulate with ever greater speed over greater distances. Until about a century ago, most people knew a great deal about their immediate material world. But the slow and pervasive separation of people from knowledge of the material world brings with it a serious problem. It’s not our fault centuries of technological sophistication and global commerce have distanced most of us from making physical things, and even from seeing or knowing how they are made. Most of us live in a state of general ignorance about our physical surroundings. Quite probably, you are surrounded by many things of which you know next to nothing – among them, the device on which you are reading these words.
The object cradling your body remains, in many ways, mysterious to you. Are you sitting comfortably? If so, how much do you know about the chair that’s holding you off the ground – what it’s made from, and what its production process looked like? Where it was made, and by whom? Or go deeper: how were the materials used to make the chair extracted from the planet? Most people will find it difficult to answer these basic questions.
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