The
BBC guy was talking about
where in civilization we came up with the
idea that something "
worked", not when it produced the
best results, but when it
operated most efficiently.
Could the
vivisystem guy have been
more right than I thought?
But
serving a purpose is a
soul's
directive; it's a
holistic view of the
essence of a
thing or operation, isn't it? You're here to do this. This
process should produce
that.
Ma Nature works that way.
Marriages and
families and
good, honest work work that way.
What works the other way? What
measures its successes based not on the
quality of the
outcome, but on the
statistical efficiency of the
work in progress? Ah, yes,
this marvelous computer. In fact, the BBC guy even
mentioned that, without this rather
pedantic view of the
work-journey, we never could have come to create
Technology in all it's
awe and bulkiness. Or perhaps, I thought at the time, we would have made a
different kind of Technology...but who knows?
Anybody who's read
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance knows what I mean by the "Why is technology
ugly?"
conundrum; I have a
strange feeling that perhaps that very
paradox--that the things we find so
useful we also find so
dry and soulless--could stem from this little
BBC development in Civilization. Could it be that the
soul of a thing is
irrevocably tied to its
essential nature, not how we
may have thought it was, but so that
By changing the meaning of any process from serving it's purpose to doing the work efficiently, we may actually be
sucking the soul out of it?!
Efficiency. It's such a
plywood word...and as soon as somebody says it, I somehow
know that the
actual purpose of whatever
work is going on is about to
be lost in the interest of "efficiency". It's a
strikingly paradoxical word...We hear it used
all the time,
supposedly to
denote something
working better...and yet, "efficiency" seems to be
diametrically opposed to "better"
results of said work. I can
reconcile this, for now, by remembering that
Ma Nature's operations, while "working"
incredibly and undeniably well--that is,
producing amazingly
useful and precise results--are
incredibly inefficient by our
standards. Is anything
wasted when
Ma Nature works? No--but that's not always the
most efficient way to do it; our
cars are
efficient largely
because they produce the waste they do. Could we
make a car that
wasted nothing?
Easily; we already nearly have. Would we call it
efficient? Yes, in the
advertising, because the word itself
sells; but the
new car is
not more "efficient"--it
works better, which is a completely
different animal. The
dirtier,
cheaper-to-make cars that
fall apart in
five years are, to the
companies that make them and the
economies that they help to drive, more efficient.
It is
argued all the time by people like
Bucky Fuller and the
Club of Rome that things which work the "best" are
always more
efficient in the long run. I don't feel that I can prove that--at least not at 8 a.m.--but I like the
sound of it. Who wouldn't? If I had to
choose between efficiency and soul, I'd certainly WANT to say, "
Both!"
What do you all think? What works better---working
better or
working better?