Mechanism

I’d like to say a few words about the notion of mechanism.

People confuse mechanism with artifice, then they unjustly condemn both for squeezing the life out of the world with their rigidity and inhuman force. However, a mechanism is simply a system of cause and effect. In this sense, machines are more than metaphors for natural processes. They are natural processes. When a system of cause and effect has the right kind of complexity, it emerges as the supple and adaptive organization of matter and energy that we call a living entity. We are complex mechanisms, embedded in a network of mechanisms. Artifice is simply man made machinery. We have drawn from the raw material and patterns we see around us, to create our own section of nature.

Artifice is too often maligned for the wrong reasons. The surface aesthetics of man-made machines are often horrid. But this is, in part, a result of designs that favor economics over sensual effect. It is also because we are primitives at design: the rest of nature has had billions of years to tinker with matter and energy. We have had much less. The fact that our inventions are often cartoonish simulacrums of organic entities does not negate their underling sameness with the rest of nature.

Simple , man made machines, with their inexorable logic, are no more treacherous than simple non-man made machines, with their inexorable logic. For every dangerous, complex man made machine, we can find an equally dangerous counter example from the rest of the natural realm. A rampaging elephant can crush a human as surely as an automobile. A plague can decimate a population as completely as a war. If our sun went nova, we would be blasted to a crisp faster and more thoroughly than we would under nuclear attack. I do not mean to imply that we are not using our machinery unwisely. I believe that we obviously are. I am saying that the fault lies not in artifice or mechanism itself, but in ourselves.