The Garden in the Machine

by

Nelson R. “Buzz” Kellogg

© 1986
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The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to
existence, one has become an adult.
— Eugene Ionesco
These words of Eugene Ionesco speak directly to the
sorrow we all feel from time to time at the passing of
innocence and childhood. A peculiar gift of that innocence
is the freedom to enjoy and wonder at anything we please,
without regard for the dictates of refinement. Few things
win our mature approval which cannot immediately be
justified by reference to a higher aesthetic authority.
Childhood is that domain where the inhabitants are not
responsible to logic or authority in their likes and dislikes.
Adults do violence to this very freedom when they use
selective observations of childhood to validate adult ideals.
This misrepresentation has been employed to great effect in
the debate over the place of technology in society. And yet,
as each generation of technical devices appears more
inscrutable to the average user, and further removed from
the artisan’s workbench, perhaps it is a particular child’s-
eye view which can restore the needed human element.
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Of Bees and Lawnmowers

While neither critics nor advocates of technology and
industry are much given to quoting children in support of
their arguments (though that has been done), there have
been many references to ideas which are culturally
associated with childhood and thereby derive much support.
Part of the Romantic heritage is the idea of a congruence
—nearly an equivalence—among childhood, nature, and
virtue. While it is not necessary to argue the exceptions to
this congruence, certain notes of this romantic chord still
resonate so strongly that they are implicit in our sense of
how the world is and ought to be. Thus, when Goethe tells
us that only children and birds can taste cherries and
strawberries, there seems to be a great deal of truth in it,
even if the sentiment is a bit treacly. A youngster drawn to
the itinerant bumble bee shows a beautiful and natural
fascination. That same child drawn to a running
lawnmower is just an unhappy collision between childhood
and the dangerous and unnatural adult world. If that last
example seems extreme, it is nonetheless true to the
sympathy most people feel for nature, and the antipathy felt
toward mechanisms. However, when the lawnmower and
the bumble bee are removed from the child’s garden, much
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of the emotional content is lost, and they do not seem so

polarized.
It is easy to distort the reactions of children toward
their environment in an effort to make any general
statement concerning the adult experience. The worlds we
create are sophisticated and intentioned, and it is impossible
to isolate any element without including values and events
which comprise the context of that element. An
automobile, therefore, is not simply a construction of metal,
rubber, and plastic. It also represents convenience, economic
progress and independence; or smog, waste and death,
depending on the context in mind. The unschooled, on the
other hand, simply receive all that is presented, and show
their approval or disapproval, fascination or aversion, with a
much lighter catechism to direct them.
The world of technology and industry is so heavily
entwined in context, that it seems almost impossible to
unpack it for examination. Our present love-affair with high
technology might find explanation in financial return,
convenience, or labor-saving, or (as in the case of the
Strategic Defense Initiative) a magical salvation from the
woes which presently seem unsolvable. Sometimes the
dramatic strides in technology we read of provide vicarious
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excitement in the otherwise dull and routine existence. A

surge in national pride during a momentous space flight is
not unlike our support of Olympic athletes.
Historically, the reactions of various writers to the
technology around them have been well-steeped in context.
Perhaps the best overview of such reactions is the
landmark study by Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden,
Oxford University Press, 1964). Marx’s treatise explored
the dimensions of two fundamental and competing
elements of American culture: industrial dynamism and the
pastoral ideal. While the book did not resolve or even alter
the debate concerning the proper course of our national
endeavor, it did give that debate a sense of history. His
careful selection of utterances by Jefferson, Melville, James
and others provided a concord of opinion. He also helped
canonize the popular notion of the intellectual’s disposition
against technology: it is by definition unnatural, and its
presence is always an intrusion.
The metaphors come quickly and easily in this conceit.
While it is possible to romanticize a steam locomotive from
our present perspective, that owes to the far more
encroaching and dehumanizing presence of current
technology. Therefore, the explanation might proceed, the
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old locomotive evokes a more pristine world (perhaps a

childhood world), and it is that world which is appealing.
Hence, the more sensitive observers of the past saw the
steam engine more rightly in the spark-showered, demonic
light of Thoreau’s murderous iron horse. And beyond
caution or even distaste for the incipient technology was
Henry Adams’ terror of uncontrolled forces and mankind’s
eventual mechanical doom.
Of course not everyone (nor all intellectuals) despised
technology. Emerson, for example, saw in it great promise.
But that promise lay in such services as bringing goods to
market, thereby fortifying rural life and agriculture, and
their unassailable benefits. It is fair to say that aesthetes and
a large portion of scholars have traditionally located
somewhere between a mistrust of and distaste for
technology, and a jaded acceptance of such a presence as a
fact of modern life. The exceptions to this tacit code have
included laissez faire theorists, and the excursions of
writers and visual artists for whom industrial power was a
Mephistophelean temptation. Certainly, America’s popular
celebration of the heroic age of invention only reinforced
the attitude of the truly sensitive, that industry and the
pursuit of the novel device is the dull dream of the
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bourgeoisie. Technology is the brutish side of man’s

creativity, a war-mentality even in the times of peace.
This harsh assessment of technology is largely
diminished among intellectuals only two decades after the
publication of Marx’s book. The reasons for the different
mentality developing are many, and perhaps too proximate
for us to fully understand. The mere passage of time,
however, is not a sufficient explanation. For whatever
reasons, few thinkers, if any, still hold to the pastoral
lifestyle as the only long-term alternative. Artists of all
stripes have found ways to utilize technolog y
sympathetically in their expressions.

A Garden of Device
It is completely wrong to place the blame for our many
self-deceptions and superstitions on the doorstep of context.
Context should not be avoided. In matters of technology
policy, context is the only responsible approach to decision-
making. The question is not whether solar energy is good
and nuclear fission is evil, and yet such scientifically-neutral
terms as chemical, artificial, organic and the like have
become so heavily imbued with spiritual and emotional
overtone that it is difficult to use them in rational
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statements of context. These overtones, which often speak

more loudly than the word itself, derive from the historical
and metaphorical garden—the home base for the natural
man.
In The Education of Henry Adams, the garden metaphors
find their most striking and direct application. While at the
Paris Exposition of 1900, Adams is overcome by the forces
he beholds in the Gallery of Machines. He feels a desire to
pray to the electric dynamo, and at this point in the
narrative establishes two kingdoms of power represented
by the Dynamo and the Virgin. As Leo Marx explains,
“Adams uses the opposition between the Virgin and the
Dynamo to figure an all-embracing conflict: a clash between
past and present, unity and diversity, love and power. In his
Manichean fashion he marshals all conceivable values. On
one side he lines up heaven, beauty, religion and
reproduction; on the other, hell, utility, science and
production.”
It is not the use of context, then, but rather a
misrepresentation of context that has colored our view of
machines. It is using a context of violence and self-willed
power, and then saying, in effect, that this is not a context of
application at all, but rather a quality that inheres in the
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device itself. The locomotive that smashes through a herd of

sheep in Frank Norris’ The Octopus is itself determined and
monstrous. Such views of technology have been common in
that amalgam of writers and artists which historians have
informally labeled intellectuals. The sensitivity of the
intelligentsia to what they felt to be the true nature of
technology was all the more fitting considering what they
deemed as their calling. The common man was callous to
the spiritual world, but poets and children still dwelt in the
virtuous garden, where things appear as they really are.
***
In the evolution of our attitudes toward technology,
there remains an avenue largely unexplored. This avenue is
important not merely to bridge the gap between devices and
the humanity which they ostensibly serve, but to perhaps
understand in a more fundamental way why many devices
come to be at all. This avenue is not an organized
thoroughfare of social theory and economic data. It is
rather a child’s fanciful and winding pathway, which we
tend to ignore since it doesn’t follow the patterns of adult
causality.
There is yet very little room given for an aesthetic
appreciation of machines, a suggestion which at first blush
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may seem misplaced. Maybe this dislocation derives, in part,

by the simple need to state that, indeed, there is an aesthetic
side to technology. This seems to misrepresent the issue, for
it already begins a defense of that posture from the
traditional value system, which finds machines in opposition
to beauty. It is not being proposed that technology can be
made unobjectionable or even pleasing, but instead that
there can be something inherently appealing in the devices
themselves.
There does exist a contemplative rapture between
certain individuals and mechanisms. It is a romance which
doesn’t need reasons although many may exist. It is a
reaction which may have much in common with sympathies
for natural beauty. But whatever it is, it is sufficient unto
itself, and to require a justification by some generally
acknowledged criterion of poetic wonder (the machine
represents power, or the craftsman’s skill, or a past life-
style, or a future potential) is to apply constraints we have
never placed on the love of nature.
Accepting, then, that this simple fondness for devices
exists among some, why has it not found a voice? Is it
because those who are possessed of it are not articulate,
thus adding strength to suspicions that anyone who could
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love a machine is a social misfit? As with any sensitivity, it

can be perversely expressed. I recall an article about ardent
collectors of toy trains, which mentioned that machines are
sometimes more than we deserve. Such a statement hints of
misanthropy. On the other hand, we may just be looking to
the wrong sources for an expression of fancy. Perhaps the
devices themselves are the best essays on this sensitivity.
Besides, we are not likely to get an open diary from many
prominent technologists. They are quite willing to accept
society’s plaudits for their cleverness and inventiveness, but
loathe to admit to a suspect motivation.
Historians of science know, for example, that scientists
are notorious for misrepresentation. Part of the scientific
credo is the universal triumph of the scientific method.
Strongly linked with this idea is the power of the work
ethic. Accordingly, the scientific method brings to bear the
full weight of logic on problems of nature or contrivance,
and the virtue of persistence makes success inevitable. If
given a choice, no self-respecting scientist would want to be
remembered for a discovery made through pure chance.
There is something slightly ignoble in Charles Goodyear’s
accidentally spilling sulphur into molten rubber and finding
that the rubber is thereby improved.
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Although inventors are portrayed as a more rough and

ready breed, and as less concerned with any particular
image than the end result, this is not always accurate.
Edison, the epitome of the heroic inventor, had a keen sense
of himself as an icon. The image produced of the man and
his work was self-conscious.
When I made a trip recently to Edison’s West Orange,
New Jersey laboratory, I wasn’t looking for a proper sense
of history—at least not Edison’s. It would be hard to find it
in the prescribed and structured presentation given to
visitors. I did feel confident that I could recapture a part of
my own history which is never very distant. Amid the
motors, generators, pumps and assorted pieces of
laboratory equipment were the forms that have stirred my
imagination, and those more primitive forms are most
evocative. The artifact has personality, but it is an
indeterminate reflection comprised of the work of the
inventor and the experience of the present-day observer.
The joy that many technically inclined individuals find
in mechanisms stems from more than an adeptness. In many
cases there was early-on excitement in being around
intricate devices and mysterious forces. James Clark
Maxwell, the most celebrated physicist of the nineteenth
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century, is reputed to have asked as a child, “What’s the go

of it” whenever confronted with a mechanical device. What
could prompt such attention to mechanisms in a child who
(while most effective in communicating) was not even able
to properly phrase the question? If we can restrain
ourselves from applying adult biases, we might imagine that
for a child there is no reason why a machine should be any
more surprising than a caterpillar or a sunrise. All events
might be equally in or out of place to a child. Nonetheless,
mechanisms are particularly exciting to some children. I use
the word mechanism, here, in a very broad sense, for I mean
it to include crystal radio sets and other things which are
not mechanical at all, but can be just as seductive to the
imagination.
It has been a visceral reaction to things that operate
under their own power (sometimes mystically and
sometimes well-understood) which has given impetus and a
great deal of heart to my personal interest in technology.
In this response there is not much difference between the
child and the man. Just as dear as some children’s
collections of seashells or “worthless junk” was my box of
motors, switches and phonograph parts. Often I would
dissect them to unlock their secrets and, having done that,
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would try to build something meaningful from the pieces.

Other times I would prefer not to disassemble them, but
would just contemplate them as they lay on the floor, or
pick them up and wonder at the neatly working parts, and
the subsequent flights of imagination remain some of my
most cherished moments. In some ways the child spoke
much more eloquently than the adult, for he would never
have thought to disguise his love for his gadgets, but would
have unhesitatingly shown the whole lot of them to anyone
who had a passing interest.
It was Edgar Allan Poe who considered science a
butcher because it could only appreciate the miracle of a
flower after it had been destroyed and its several parts
removed and labeled. I cannot blame Poe for his revulsion
over what he felt was the heartless heart of science. Would
Poe’s Gothic sensibilities show technology to be more evil
still than cold, investigative science since a machine is the
animation of that which
never did live? It is something which figuratively and
literally causes death as it survives. The Industrial
Revolution gave credence to such a view, and it is not
difficult to see our own lives punctuated with its effect.
Surely there is another side to the issue, though.
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It is wrong and it is perverse to consider machines as

being too good for mere people. But sometimes, for some
people (and certain children), machines are just wonderful
enough.
Alexandria, Virginia, 1986