Sennett—The Craftsman (i)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

---

Prologue: Man as His Own Maker

Pandora's Casket
Hannah Arendt and Robert Oppenheimer

Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis,... I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In The Human Condition, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. ... She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don't understand what they are doing.

Arendt's fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.

Well,
if a given

fear

well and truly

traces back,

then it is not

her

fear.

And
if it is
"her" fear,
then it does not
"trace back."

i.e. We're already headed for the Genetic Fallacy. Not a great start.

Waiting For The Singularity

A thought on political dysfunction for this singularly disheartening election season:

Owing to immutable material conditions, the impending technocracy is thought to be already quite well prepared to automate most of what we do with our limbs and yet quite far indeed from automating most of what we do with our brains. Wouldn't we be better off if the reverse were true? Us human grunts have come to so despise manual labor while taking such pride in governing ourselves; and yet we seem to be quite a bit more competent in the former arena than the latter. Perhaps, then, we ought to put the robots in charge NOW, warts and all. Even their not-quite-human level of intelligence should be adequate to notice how close we are to destroying each other and summarily put us all back to work making widgets. Actually, given that "the social animal" is also the cronyist, nepotist, tribalist animal, perhaps being not-quite-human is actually the robots' strongest qualification for the job.