Elon Musk Should Heed Albert Einstein

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

Albert Einstein

Like everyone, I often fall behind in starting many of the tasks that I assign myself. Having undergone a little shoulder surgery recently, I was grateful for the chance to just sit and clear up some reading that I have been meaning to get to. Fortune Magazine (which I still receive in paper form) had an article on Elon Musk (as Fortune’s Business Person of the Year) that looked interesting last December and I finally settled in to read it last week.

The article was one of the best summaries that I have read on the new philosophical direction of our society: technology as destiny and our summum bonum. We can see how far our society has moved towards technology as our summum bonum (highest order) when the author of the article quotes a physicist, David Deutsch, regarding his definition of an optimist. According to Deutsch, optimists are those who believe that any problem that doesn’t contradict physics can be solved. I think that Aristotle, Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas would beg to differ.

Much of the article focuses on two of Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX and the comparison of Musk to Steve Jobs of Apple and Pixar fame. For me however, the crux of the article comes from its focus on how Musk is using technology to seduce mankind to move towards an electric (Tesla) and solar powered future here on an ecologically challenged Earth and if we fail in that, SpaceX can help us colonize Mars.

What could be wrong with that you might ask?

Nothing in so far as the technology goes, but Musk, violating the Einstein method above, is asking the wrong question in my opinion. He is focused on the question, how do we save mankind on a planet we seem determined to destroy with pollution?

The more important question is, is mankind worth saving?  There is another question that Musk should also be asking before he spends precious resources figuring out how to colonize Mars; if we place technology at the apex of our society, do we lose something that is more important than a clean planet? 

To get a better idea of where Musk has run off the rails I am going to turn to the thoughts of C.S. Lewis, largely borrowing from his book The Abolition of Man.

For Lewis, following Natural Law (or the Tao as he called it) must be our summum bonum, or goal, as it has been throughout most of history. Natural Law, in contrast to today’s moral relativism, tells us that some things are objectively good or bad and that we are to use our free will to follow this natural law. For example, if a fire breaks out we may feel two competing instincts; the flight to safety impulse would be a strong one. We would also feel the need to help others before we ourselves should flee. Natural Law tells us which of these two instincts is the correct one.

Lewis became quite concerned that technology was replacing natural law as our summum bonum and the result was The Abolition of Man.

For Lewis, technology represented man’s power over nature. In Abolition, he used three examples of technology: the airplane, wireless and contraceptives. His view was that technology could be withheld from some men by other men. It could be withheld by those who sell the products, by those who allow the sale (government) and the owners of the sources of production. Man’s power over nature is thus the power of some men over others. 

As man modifies the environment today, he obviously exercises power over successor generations as well. Additionally, in modifying the environment bequeathed to it, today’s generation rebels against tradition and limits the power of the predecessor generations.

He points to the idea, perhaps many centuries from now, when one age will by scientific education, genetic manipulation and propaganda be able to exercise complete power and be able to make its descendants whatever it pleases. All who will come after this point will be nothing but patients, or trousered apes in the parlance of Lewis. They will be incapable of utilizing their free will to follow natural law. They will no longer, therefore, be men. The conquest of nature will be the conquest of everyone by a few.

And what of these few, those whom Lewis called the controllers? What is to guide these controllers? If technology is their summum bonum, they must eliminate natural law, otherwise man’s conquest of nature is incomplete. All that will be left to guide them will be their own urges and instincts.

Since these controllers will be able to eliminate natural law and free will from the minds of men and replace it with whatever they choose, they will no longer be men but they will be gods. The paradox however, will be that these gods will be controlled by their urges. The conquest of nature by man will, in reality, be nature’s conquest of man, the abolition of man. Man will cease to exist.

For man to exist natural law and free will must exist and they must be our purpose, our summum bonum.  The concluding question here should be, what is the point of colonizing Mars with trousered apes? What is the point of a clean planet if everyone is left with a polluted soul?

The Fortune article ends:

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” By that definition Jobs and Musk are the ultimate in unreasonable men. And the world is much better for it.

Shaw, and Fortune, could not have been more wrong! After all, just what is it that Shaw’s unreasonable man is progressing towards?

Peter Kreeft in his book C.S. Lewis for the Third Millenium wrote:

Aristotle rated (technology) as third on the hierarchy of values after (1) knowledge of the truth for its own sake, and (2) practical knowledge, or knowledge for living, for acting. The modern world has simply turned this hierarchy upside down as it has turned man upside down.

Some things are objectively true and we must always place a desire to understand this above other things, including technology. Without that, we cannot right ourselves.

 Disclaimer: Nothing on this site should be construed as investment advice. It is all merely the opinion of the author.