In 1912, the year of his death and one year after his brother Orville stayed aloft in a manned glider for a record-setting nine minutes and forty-five seconds, Wilbur Wright paid tribute to a predecessor in aeronautics, Otto Lilienthal. “No one,” said Wright, “equaled [Lilienthal] in fullness and dearness of understanding of the principles of flight.” Lilienthal, who made major advances in glider technology, based his engineering work on the study of bird flight. In his 1889 book Bird Flight as the Basis of Aviation—which contains chapters like “The Superiority of Natural Wings over Plane Wing Surface” and “The Determination of the Air Pressure in Birds’ Wings Surfaces”—he wrote that “in order to discover the principles which facilitate flight, and to eventually enable man to fly, we must take the bird for our model.”

The imitation of non-human animals or other organic life, of which Lilienthal’s method is an example, is known as engineering through biomimesis, the fruits of which include designs not only for planes but also for trains, turbines, and Velcro. Human sciences, that is, do not always aim to assert human will against all natural facts. At least sometimes, medicine restores, agriculture cultivates, engineering imitates. That human beings can, at first glance, sometimes work with nature and sometimes work against it raises questions about how we can evaluate these different types of human engagement with the world. Is the former better than the latter? What are the conditions, if any, that justify a human control of nature, and is it appropriate to describe human actions as violent if they do not meet those conditions? Looking at three treatments of human control—that of John McPhee in his book The Control of Nature, that of sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and that of theologian Paul Griffiths—can shed light on these questions and lead us to a more satisfying place by moving past the terms on which debates over technological control are often conducted.

The Limits of Control

In The Control of Nature, his classic 1989 dispatches from the front lines, McPhee observes humans at war, reporting on three campaigns to subdue the ecosystems in which some people live: the attempt by the US Army Corps of Engineers to prevent the Atchafalaya River from absorbing and redirecting the Mississippi River, a battle against a lava flow on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, and the defence of Los Angeles from the rocky sheddings of the San Gabriel Mountains. There is not a clear winner in these three ambiguous conflicts. Settlements up against the San Gabriel Mountains, places like Glendora, Azusa, and Altadena, are still there, still populated. The Icelanders and islanders on Heimaey successfully prevented the volcanic eruption from destroying the island’s harbour, the central goal of their battle. And despite cost and continued complications, the US Army Corps of Engineers is still succeeding in keeping the Atchafalaya from capturing the Mississippi, contrary to a 1980 study, cited by McPhee, that predicted a change of river course would happen, in the upper end of the estimate, “sometime in the next 30 or 40 years.”

Nevertheless, the reader comes away from The Control of Nature with a sense that perhaps some battles are not worth fighting. Some fights are too costly; some cannot be decisively won but only continued. Some can have knock-on effects for ecosystems or indeed for human settlements themselves. (“The more the levees confined the river,” McPhee writes of attempts to erect barriers to protect Louisiana settlements from the Mississippi, “the more destructive it became when they broke through.”)

The introduction of human measures of control over nature, moreover, can create new political problems, inspire new animosities. A group’s attitude toward the world may be very different if its livelihood is destroyed by naturally occurring ecological changes rather than by human decisions to favour one stakeholder over another. In his reporting on the Mississippi River efforts, McPhee touches on how individuals reacted to the vagaries of the river before control structures were put in place. “They wouldn’t complain,” says one of the subjects McPhee speaks with, “because there wasn’t nothing you could do.” After the engineers did their work, however, locals did complain when decisions made by managers created the same conditions that they simply accepted when those conditions had previously occurred naturally. Likewise, fighting a lava flow by cooling it with pumped water, as was done on Heimaey, diverts that flow elsewhere. (Actions taken on Heimaey to break up a two-ton mass that had split off the volcano likely played a role in the subsequent destruction of parts of the town.) Destruction is no longer a matter of chance but a result of human choice. Trust, like coastal lands, erodes.

None of these reasons for caution about human attempts at controlling nature decide the questions raised by McPhee’s book, but they do suggest that acceptance of natural facts—such as the fact that a given geography is not, or no longer, hospitable to a particular urban and industrial settlement—should at least occasionally set a limit to what humans attempt to achieve in their interactions with the world. The natural question becomes, then, what the nature of such limits are, what separates occasions of restraint from occasions of effort.

At first glance, there appear to be two clearly divided ways of answering this question. Take, for example, the two examples of flight through biomimesis and the attempt to prevent the Mississippi from changing course. One kind of person will simply approach the adoption of both of these technologies through a series of factual questions: Will the airplane fly? Can we make the river stay put? Are there material downsides to deploying the relevant technologies? Do our efforts come out ahead in a pragmatic cost-benefit analysis? The pragmatist isn’t resistant to moral considerations as such, but those considerations are kept on a tight leash: It may be wrong, in this perspective, to develop nuclear weapons since they have no other use than the mass destruction of human life. The splitting of the atom itself, however, is a morality-free zone.

The other kind of person will wonder if metaphysical issues are at play in the intersections of technology, nature, and human life. Perhaps, for example, this person may believe that we engage the world successfully when we cooperate with it or take our cue from it, and invite calamity when we attempt to defy it. Biomimesis, then, is in, and the controlling of rivers is out, no matter what the cost-benefit analysis says.

This characterization risks superficiality, however, and encourages people to misread those they take to represent the opposing sensibility. Consider, for example, Wendell Berry, a principled Luddite if ever a pragmatist saw one. In his essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry lists nine tests that constitute his “standards for technological innovation.” Some of these tests are variations on ones any good venture capitalist with a tinge of environmental consciousness would ask. Berry, for example, is merely restating the concept of a value proposition when he demands that a new technology “should be cheaper than the one it replaces” and “should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.” Even his more philosophical or divisive tests, such as his insistence that a new technology should “not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships,” are easy to understand and do not invoke anything mystical or recondite.

On the other hand, debates over the use of a number of technologies, such as CRISPR gene editing, certain AI tools, and digital communications technologies, show that it’s not only culturally marginal techno-pessimists who are alert to broad ethical issues, who ask questions about the compatibility of certain technologies with human flourishing, and who express concerns that some tools may adversely affect human life even if they are technically successful. There may, that is, be more shared evaluative instincts between these two groups than first appears.

Control and Resonance

Still, differences remain, such as the question of violence. Is it possible for humankind to be violent toward nature? The pragmatist may think only in terms of technically successful or technically unsuccessful encounters with nature, but the philosopher may think in terms of violence. For sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the author of the 2018 book The Uncontrollability of the World, the question of human aggression toward the world should be analyzed through the lens of control. Rosa’s control is not precisely the control that McPhee’s book studies. McPhee reports on specific attempts to regulate discrete aspects of the natural environment in extreme circumstances or in places of questionable habitability. Such attempts would not fall outside the purview of Rosa’s concern (“Man against nature. That’s what life’s all about,” remarks a lead Army Corps of Engineers official in McPhee’s book), but Rosa is interested in contrasting two basic orientations to life, one that lives by control and optimization in all areas of life—including human relationships, one’s own life trajectory, and one’s management of one’s own body—and one that is open to what Rosa calls “resonance.”

Resonance occurs when we respond to something in the world that moves us. Being transported by a song or a passage in a book, having a human conversation or looking into the eyes of someone who looks into yours, experiencing a landscape that affects us—these are all examples of resonance for Rosa. In experiences of resonance, we transform the world and the world transforms us. The conditions for resonance can never be engineered; we cannot generate resonance on demand. It happens unbidden, and it changes us in ways we cannot predict or plan.

Control, on the other hand, is the existential condition that Rosa believes dominates modernity. We look to master everything, “making the world calculable, manageable, predictable, and controllable in every respect.” All of human life becomes like reciting a script only we have written in a meticulously designed film set only we have built. In the world of resonance the other can call to us in its own voice; in the world of control all the voices that reach us are only the echoes of our own. For Rosa, this orientation means that late modern subjects experience the world as a “point of aggression” to be overcome and subjugated. Anything that is not at our disposal exactly when and how we want it is an obstacle to our control that angers and frustrates us, and we must fight to bring it into line. This orientation kills resonance, and it creates new forms of uncontrollability that introduce greater dangers than those we would have been exposed to otherwise. (“This is planned chaos,” a subject in McPhee’s book remarks. “The more planning they do, the more chaotic it is.”)

Rosa’s case is not as far-reaching as it may first appear. He allows that it is proper to human nature to transform ourselves and our environment. Human beings can only experience resonance in a world that they partly—but do not fully—control, a situation he calls “semicontrollability.” And he believes that the dynamics that create hostility between the modern subject and the world are rooted in something proper to human nature:

These qualifications make Rosa’s framework more plausible but in some ways less helpful when it comes to evaluating specific decisions we must make about technologies that increase our control over the world. If it is a problem for “the aggressive aspect of our relationship to the world” to “permeate every area of life,” then presumably we should not worry if it permeates some areas of life. But which areas should we allow it to permeate, and which areas should we forbid it to enter? Does it matter which, or should we just flip a coin?

Other, similar questions can be asked. Total control of some part of the world, for Rosa, obtains when we know about it, we can reach or access it, we make it manageable, and we make it useful to us; semicontrollability occurs when only some of these conditions hold. Is it existentially acceptable for humans to make some aspects of the world manageable and useful (totally controlled) to us as long as we leave other parts of the world in a state of semicontrollability? Or should humans never exert total control over any part of the world? If not, how ought we to distinguish, for instance, between the forms of manageability and usefulness we manifestly should pursue (developing and administering the polio vaccine, for example) and those we shouldn’t?

Rosa himself notes, in a section of his book in which he discusses medical decisions, that “the tremendous successes modernity has had in making natural processes controllable, both in and beyond the field of medicine, have yielded scientific, technological, medical, and even political advancements that have created, established, and secured spaces of resonance for many people in many different contexts.” So, perhaps, control and resonance are not per se in competition with each other. Rather, there are types of control that facilitate resonance and types of control that dampen resonance, and we should pursue the former and avoid the latter. If so, how can we know in advance whether we are dealing with the good or the bad kind of control? What tests can we apply? It can’t be a matter of whether the four aspects of total control—knowledge, access, management, and usefulness—are in place, because those would apply just as well to medical advances that facilitate resonance as to those that do not.

In the book, Rosa disclaims any intent to offer an “ethical plea.” He is not aiming to provide specific directions for human action. So perhaps it is unfair to raise these kinds of questions by way of criticism. Even so, they naturally come to mind, at least as an extrapolation of his argument. Such questions tease out the ways in which absolute rules tend to fail.

It seems right to urge, against the pragmatists, that we must look to more than only technical success and certain limited moral standards in considering the adoption and deployment of technologies. But it also seems wrong to pin these broader considerations to a set of objective, universal rules that provide clear answers to human decisions about technology. Rules that distinguish cleanly between total control and semicontrollability, or between cooperating with nature and defying nature, would be too rigid to serve human actors well. The attempt to arrest or redirect lava flows on Iceland, for instance, took its inspiration from observations of an earlier flow’s interactions with the sea—“The sea cooled it,” a scientist in McPhee’s account recalls, and “I wondered, could anything similar be done by man?”—but the effort was conceptualized and experienced as a war against nature by its participants. One person’s biomimesis is another person’s defiance of nature.

Curiosity and Studiousness

We have to deal ultimately with the habits of the subject—that is, with the virtues. In his book The Vice of Curiosity: An Essay on Intellectual Appetite, theologian Paul Griffiths provides an account of the virtuous and vicious forms of human knowing. These are classified in the Augustinian (and classically Christian) tradition as curiosity, a vice of knowing, and studiousness, the opposite virtue. To McPhee’s control as redirection of nature and Rosa’s control as the manageable and useful world, Griffiths adds another variable: control as the sequestration—ownership in a precisely modern sense—of “tangible goods,” or of things known. For Griffiths, the curious knower seeks to own what they know, making it private, something that belongs only to them. This appetite rejects the public nature of goods in the world, denies the depths of things (replacing the gaze with the glance), and perceives everything as existing on its own as an isolated object to be dominated and consumed—rather than seeing goods in light of their creation by God, who alone possesses. Curiosity involves “the lust for dominance that ownership brings” and is “a kind of self-inflicted and self-directed violence.” “The curious person,” he moreover writes, “inhabits a world of objects which can be sequestered and possessed; the studious person inhabits a world of gifts, given things, which can be known by participation, but which, because of their very natures, can never be possessed.” The gifts include human artifacts, for “there are no things brought into being solely by the efforts of someone other than God.”

Griffiths is interested in learning in the context of the modern academy—in the ways in which models and metaphors of owning, seeking new knowledge, and mastering an academic field are informed by a vicious curiosity. In contrasting studiousness with this kind of contemporary academic curiosity, he offers this key principle, which can apply broadly to human engagements with the world:

The problem, for Griffiths, is not the acquisition of these technical skills themselves, for which Christians can provide a theological justification. The difference between the curious and the studious person is in how our justifications, the way we see the world, and our overall habits of life provide a framework in which these technical skills are learned and deployed, even when, from the outside, some specific activities might look exactly the same. To an observer, the curious person silently solving a quadratic equation may look no different from the studious person silently solving a quadratic equation. It does not follow that the studious person will never act differently than the curious person, that the habit of studiousness will spill over into, or limit, action in an observable way. (As Griffiths says, difference also occurs in how these skills are used.) However, we cannot formulate universal rules that can tell us in every decision how the studious will act in distinction from how the curious will act. Sometimes they will simply act in the same way, but with a different “tone.”

We can see this point more clearly if we look at how Griffiths analyzes the idea of control of knowledge through the contrast between Christian and modern ideas of property ownership. The Augustinian view of property ownership, as Griffiths outlines it, sees God as the true owner of property, with humans only granted the use of it. Human laws do regulate the use of property in such a way that people are granted exclusive legal right to it, but this ought not to be confused with a natural right to it. Though we may obey human laws, we should qualify them in light of God’s ownership, hold our legal property lightly, and recognize that aspects of a regime of legal exclusive right to property are bound up with human fallenness. Griffiths contrasts this with a modern view in which the legal right reflects a true natural right, and in which we are encouraged to be possessive of our possessions. But how, to an observer, would someone who believes they only have the legal use of a property look different from someone who believes they have a natural right to a property? Take a house and its land. Much of one’s day-to-day habitation of the property would look the same. The observable differences might be subtle—a greater generosity with one’s property, a willingness to share it more freely with others, an open-handedness that can better sustain its loss—and this subtlety would be a clue to a different inner spirit.

We can apply these concepts directly back to the question of the control of nature and the deployment of technologies. In this view, in making the decision about whether to cool the lava, to develop the polio vaccine, or to use a smartphone, we would have to consult what I’ve called the pragmatic standards: What are the material costs and benefits of adopting this technology? Is it cheaper and more efficient than existing technologies? Does it perform its intended function well? We would also make sure to ask as broadly as possible about costs: What environmental harms would follow, for example, from widespread use or adoption of this technology? Are there predictable social costs of these technologies? If so, are the environmental or social costs realistically capable of amelioration, or are they outweighed by the benefits of the technology, whether those benefits are material, environmental, social, or otherwise? (After all, a technology can be environmentally harmful and beneficial in different respects.) The wider lens we take on the costs and benefits, and the more abstract the category of cost and benefit becomes, the more values and philosophical positions enter into the analysis and the more disagreement is possible. However, the methodology is the same across the categories, and the frame of the conversation remains grounded and specific.

Yet relying solely on the “tool” or “lens” of a cost-benefit analysis, even one that is adventurous in the kinds of costs and benefits it is willing to include, misses something, something that an external list of fixed, objective, philosophical standards tries but fails to give us. We should endeavour to walk the line between a type of control of nature that seeks to possess the world in the way Griffiths critiques and a type of engagement of nature that may look at times, to an external observer, no different from curiosity’s control—but which is different because the people doing it are different by virtue of their studiousness. This approach, in other words, evaluates the “how” of our interactions with the world as much as, or in some cases more than, the “what.”

When Augustine distinguishes curiosity from studiousness in On the Trinity, he remarks that the studious mind loves what it knows “on account of which it wishes to know what it does not know,” while the curious person “is more fitly said to hate things he knows not, of which he wishes that there should be none, in wishing to know everything.” We must interact with the world as studious people, not as curious people—that is, as people who love the world, not as people who hate it. To love the world does not mean to cease from adaptive transformation, to reject new technologies, or to act only always with the grain of ecosystems as we find them. It does not, that is, remove the burden of evaluating, on a case-by-case basis, with whatever mix of considerations is yours, the wisdom of adopting any particular technology, the advisability of any particular transformation of the environment, the compatibility of your actions with a studious orientation toward the world. It means to hold the world loosely, to see and love the gift precisely as gift—and to contemplate and love the giver who gave it all.