How to understand this hidden driver of the modern world |
We have a choice. We could leave our goals and values fuzzy. We can value things like wisdom, communication, friendship, or community. These are recognizable and very human values. But without further sharpening, we will probably disagree viciously about how to apply them.
Or we can make our values mechanical. The more explicit and mechanical we make our goals and values, the easier it will be to coordinate, and the easier it will be to figure out exactly how well we’ve done. Instead of aiming at health, we can aim at achieving our step-count goals. Instead of aiming at community and connection, we can aim at Likes and Follows. Instead of aiming at educating our students for wisdom and reflection, we can aim at standardized test scores, fast graduation rates, and higher salaries.
Yet it can also feel like these mechanical values are systematically missing out on something else, something crucial — something hard to name but absolutely essential to human life. There is a gap between what’s easy to count and what’s really important.
To get a clearer grip on what that something is, we need to understand what happens when we change between fuzzy values and mechanical values. Mechanical values — and the mechanical rules at their heart — are one of the most important hidden drivers of the modern world.
The philosophy of rules
The upside to mechanical values is that they’re easy to apply. It’s very hard to agree with other people about what counts as a full life, as great art, or as a soul-nourishing vocation. But it’s easy to agree about what leads to statistically longer lifespans, more page views and engagement hours, or more money. When we turn our values mechanical, we make it easy to agree on who did better. We can compare our achievements instantly, and automatically; there is no arguing about which post got more Likes. But we also lose something.
Why do mechanical values seem so thin and insensitive? Mechanical values turn life into something like a game; at least, they take away our fuzzy, but deeply felt human values, and replace with clear, cut-and-dried rules for judging how well we did, and who won. But what does that do? For help, we can turn to the intellectual historian Lorraine Daston, who has given us a profound investigation into the nature of a rule. Because mechanical values are rule systems for evaluating success — and failure.
Historically, says Daston, we’ve used three incredibly different ideas of a rule. The first kind of rule is a principle. This is a general abstract statement about what to do — but there are exceptions. A principle isn’t meant to be applied unthinkingly and automatically. It’s supposed to be applied with judgment and care — and the knowledge that the rule won’t always work.
When I was taking creative writing classes, my teachers always told us the rule: “Show, don’t tell.” And for the most part, good fiction follows the “show, don’t tell” rule. But if you search through great literature, you’ll find plenty of exceptions. Tolstoy starts Anna Karenina with one of the finest opening lines in all of literature: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy is telling and not showing.
I was the kind of smart‑ass who loved pointing out exceptions like this. But my creative writing teacher said that I was missing the point. “Show, don’t tell” is a general guideline, not an absolute rule. If you really know what you’re doing — if you understand the deep reason underneath the simple rule — you know when to break it. Principles are generalities meant to be applied with care, judgment, and discretion.
To be an algorithm is to be a rule that has been written to be used without significant skill, judgment, or discretion.
The second kind of rule is what Daston calls a model. This is an ideal — a role model, an exemplar. Daston turns to an old religious manual, The Rule of Saint Benedict. And it turns out the rule here isn’t some explicit statement in words. The rule is Saint Benedict himself, the actual historical person. To follow the rule of Saint Benedict isn’t to follow some explicit procedure, but to model yourself on Saint Benedict, to do what he would have done. This is the kind of rule embodied in mottoes like “What would Jesus do?” And notice that when you apply a model, you aren’t following some formula. You have a complex and open‑ended process: activating your understanding of this model person, and imagining how they’d act in some new situation.
Principles and models both require careful judgment to apply. Whether such a rule applies to this particular case will always be open to interpretation and up for debate.
The third kind of rule is completely........