Steve Jobs died a year ago October 5th, and we can expect his ghost to appear in any number of recollections and assessments as the anniversary approaches.

I’d like to talk here about a spirit that Jobs carried within himself. It’s a spirit he relied on for inspiration, although he seemed at times to have lost track of its whisper. In any event, what it says can tell us a lot about our relationship to machines.

I refer to the spirit of Romanticism. I spent much of this past summer reading about the Romantics — the original Romantics, that is, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — and it’s remarkable how closely their most cherished beliefs correspond to principles that Jobs considered crucial to his success at Apple.

What Apple does that other companies don’t, Jobs often said, is infuse the technologies it produces with human values. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” he said during one of his famous product introductions. “We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Jobs can be forgiven for never getting very specific about what he meant by marrying technology to the humanities. It’s by definition a subject that’s hard to pin down, though not especially hard to understand. Basically he was saying that Apple’s products have soul and that people are attracted to those products because they can feel that soul, both consciously and unconsciously. These are things the Romantics thought about a lot.

That the creative artist can bring life to inanimate objects was a central conviction of the Romantic poets. (I’m speaking of the thrust of the Romantic movement in general; individuals within the movement disagreed on specific issues.) For them, the inanimate object in question was words; for Jobs, it was technology, but the basic point — that a work of art, properly executed, carries within it an invisible, living essence — was the same. Devoid of this essence, said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, what’s produced is as lifeless as the “cold jelly” of a corpse.

Put in contemporary terms, soul from the Romantic perspective is an emergent quality, a product of the harmonious, organic relationship between constituent parts. Even when those individual elements are familiar in other contexts, as the elements of Apple’s products were often said to be, combining them with due attention to essence can bring something new into the world. As Coleridge put it, the true artist “places things in a new light… What oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest… [He] not only displays what tho often seen in its unfolded mass had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, Lights & Relations.”

By “Relations,” Coleridge meant unity. Each part is completely faithful to the creation as a whole. To construct a work in accord with some “mean or average proportion” is to dilute its essence, said William Hazlitt, “for a thing is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself.”

This supports Jobs’ insistence that Apple maintain control over both its hardware and its software, a policy that insured they would work seamlessly together. Soul emerges on its own in nature, but not in art. The unity on which it depends is concealed, as one critic put it, beneath “a surface world of chaos and confusion.” To reveal essence requires not only vision, but also focused attention and deliberate action. Coleridge coined a word to describe the unifying power of the creative imagination: “esemplastic,” derived from the Greek for “to shape into one.”

Nor will essence emerge on the strength of reason alone. Indeed, Romanticism was explicitly and decidedly a revolt against reason, a rejection of the empirical presumption of the Enlightenment. Coleridge considered the “Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy” his lifelong enemy; its endless reductionism smothered, he believed, any trace of vitality. What remained wasn’t art, he said, but “a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding” — a fair description of how Steve Jobs viewed the products of Apple’s longtime rival, Microsoft.

There’s no question that Jobs was intimately familiar with and sympathetic to the Romantics’ convictions, if only because they were shared by two of his most formative influences, Eastern religion and the 60s counterculture. This is not to say he was directly aware of that coalescence; I’ve seen no interview with Jobs in which the Romantics are mentioned. Nor is there evidence to suggest he recognized how freely the streams of the three philosophies intertwined. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, wrote poetry based on the Bhagavad Gita and paid tribute in person to Coleridge and Carlyle. Autobiography of a Yogi, a book Jobs claimed to have read annually since he was in college, quotes Emerson several times. Values regularly celebrated in Romantic texts — passion, spontaneity, authenticity — were counterculture touchstones as well.

Jobs’ philosophy, then, overlapped with the Romantics’, whether he knew it or not. Coleridge famously said that every person was either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian — the Romantics were Platonists, Bill Gates would qualify as an Aristotelian — and that no one changed from one orientation to the other. It may be that Jobs was, as he and many others contended, an exception to that rule, able to play successfully on both sides of the technology/humanities divide.

There were signs that Jobs wasn’t finding it easy to hold on to his Romanticism as his business career progressed. In Apple’s early days he’d been a believer in the messianic promise of the computer revolution, convinced they could be the greatest force in history for human liberation. In more recent interviews, he dismissed suggestions that computers were going to solve the problems of the world, and he was stung by critics who said that some of Apple’s products were more about consumerism than creativity. He was also disappointed in the narrowness of vision he saw in the students who came to hear him speak on college campuses. The only thing that seemed to impress them, he said, was how much money he’d made.

Jobs’ weariness speaks to a point I’d mentioned at the beginning of this article: that the spirit of Romanticism can tell us a lot about our relationships to machines. To believe that technology can be our savior was a minority opinion in the counterculture. The predominant sentiments of the time were more in tune with the Romantics, who believed that salvation was to be found not in the power of machines, but by living as simply and as closely to nature as possible.

Pastoral retreat on any substantial scale isn’t likely at this point. Our technologies are with us to stay. Living more simply would seem to be an option, though. We might also consider the possibility of constructing those technologies more Romantically. That would entail recognizing, as Steve Jobs did, that the things we create really do have souls and that they speak a language we can hear.

Books that were especially useful in research for this reflection were Richard Holmes‘ two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, M.H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, David Newsome’s Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought, and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

Photo: Screenshot from Apple’s iPad 2 announcement.

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A week ago today, a privately funded startup called Planetary Resources announced that it had embarked on a program to mine trillions of dollars’ worth of precious metals and other resources from asteroids in space. The project is undeniably ambitious, yet in their press conference the company’s executives took pains to emphasize the pragmatism of their approach. Exponential advances in technology now make it possible, said co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis, for small companies to accomplish what once required the backing of governments or large corporations. Planetary Resources plans to deploy “swarms” of low-cost telescope satellites to find asteroids that are rich in water, platinum, and other assets, but relatively close to Earth. They will then be mined not by people but by robots.

To be sure, there’s nothing modest about the profits Planetary Resources hopes to realize. There were also frequent mentions during the press conference of how the project’s success would benefit all of humankind, not only by developing new supplies of diminishing resources but also by keeping alive the dream of space exploration itself. Still, the gee whiz factor was kept to a minimum. Diamandis even claimed at one point that he’d dreamed since he was a teenager of being an asteroid miner, which seemed to be taking pragmatism a bit too far. Surely a teenager can imagine more glamorous things to do in space than that.

The press conference’s one truly utopian moment came in a comment from Planetary Resource’s other co-founder and co-chairman, Eric Anderson. My guess is that he momentarily let his enthusiasm get the best of him when he let slip his vision of where, in the long run, this could be heading. “We see the future of Earth as a garden of Eden,”he said, “as a place where we take care of the Earth and protect the environment and we do our heavy industries and our mining and all that sort of stuff in space!”

Ah, the Garden of Eden. In truth that’s what we’ve always been after, although we’re less inclined to admit it today than we used to be. In 1833 a German immigrant named John Jacob Etzler published “The Paradise Within Reach of All Men,” the first extended work of technological utopianism to appear in the United States. Follow my proposals for harnessing the elements with machines, Etzler declared, and within 10 years “everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury …” He went on.

Skepticism regarding technological miracles was less prevalent then than it is today. Even so, Etzler predicted that some would greet his proposals with ridicule, and he was right. Among them was Henry David Thoreau, who published, anonymously, a review of Etzler’s book that was slyly humorous in parts, openly sarcastic in others. “Let us not succumb to nature,” he wrote. “We will marshal the clouds and restrain the tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations, we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up; and give vent to the dangerous gases; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we had looked into these things.”

A similar exchange occurred in the mid 1970s when a Princeton physics professor named Gerard O’Neill came forward with his own proposal for mining asteroids. O’Neill envisioned a series of permanently inhabited, self-sustaining human colonies orbiting in deep space. Huge inter-connected cylinders, each encompassing a land area as large as 100 square miles, would accommodate, in addition to extensive mining operations, capacious living quarters, gardens, and recreation areas. Settlers would be attracted not only by the promise of employment, O’Neill said, but also by internal climate conditions equivalent to “quite attractive modern communities in the U.S. and in southern France.” He added that, because levels of gravity could be varied within the cylinders, a short walk up a hillside could bring a resident to an area where “human-powered flight would be easy” and “sports and ballet could take on a new dimensions.”

Government funding was still the way to go at that point, and O’Neill appeared before subcommittees of the House of Representatives and the Senate to present his ideas. Here, too, it seems clear the intention was to portray the project as entirely reasonable. Mentions of southern France and flying ballet dancers were exceptions; charts and graphs were the rule. What we’re talking about, O’Neill testified, is “civil engineering on a large scale in a well-understood, highly-predictable environment.”

Again, naysayers emerged. Stewart Brand solicited comments on the project for the Spring 1976 edition of “CoEvolution Quarterly,” a spinoff of the “Whole Earth Catalog.” Brand was an enthusiastic supporter, but many of his readers weren’t. The writer, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry called O’Neill’s proposals “an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change.” E F. Schumacher, author of “Small Is Beautiful,” wrote that he’d be happy to nominate several hundred people to ship into outer space immediately, so that the real work of saving the planet could proceed unimpeded.

Failing to find support in Congress, O’Neill’s project faded away. Soon after that the personal computer industry began its remarkable rise in Silicon Valley, reinvigorating the idea that technology can change the world overnight, making a lot of people extremely rich in the process. No accident that many of Planetary Resources’ investors acquired their fortunes digitally. When you have billions to spend, your dreams don’t have to make sense.

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To borrow a line from Chuck Berry, it goes to show you never can tell.

I embarked this week on a bit of historical research, thinking I might find some connections between the factory workers of the digital era and those of the industrial era. Along the way I found myself confronting deep questions about the relationship between technology and spirit.

As most people know, there’s been a raft of publicity lately about the conditions that prevail in the mega-factories of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based company that produces many of the digital devices we love so well. Even as Foxconn was denying that its workers are mistreated, the company announced it was raising their salaries by as much as 25 percent, its third announced pay increase in the past two years. Overtime hours are also being reduced.

No doubt these adjustments are aimed in part at repairing some of the damage to Foxconn’s public image, and to the public images of its clients, notably Apple Computer. A dozen or so employee suicides in rapid succession tend to attract critical scrutiny.

That’s not the whole story, however. Several reports also point out that Foxconn is at pains to stabilize the high rates of employee turnover in its factories, turnover that suggests the company may not always be able to depend on the vast, pliant pool of migrant labor that’s fueled its explosive growth so far.

All this struck me as having some interesting parallels with the evolution of labor policies in the factories of an earlier breakthrough technology, the automobile.

In 1913 Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line at his Highland Park factory in Michigan, revolutionizing the process of mass production. The following year he revolutionized his company’s relationship with its workers by introducing the Five Dollar Day, a pay rate that more than doubled the average employee’s salary. He also cut back the standard shift from nine to eight hours.

There were strings attached, including requirements that Ford’s standards of cleanliness and sobriety be met at home as well as at work. Nonetheless, for the legions of mostly immigrant workers who besieged the employment office at Highland Park, the Five Dollar Day redefined what it meant to earn a living wage.

Like the pay raises at Foxconn, the Five Dollar Day was aimed at reducing unacceptable rates of employee turnover. The profits Ford was realizing with his production efficiencies were being eaten up by the cost of replacing 370 per cent of his workforce a year. Workers hadn’t yet grown accustomed to the grinding routine of the assembly line; absenteeism was also rampant. The Five Dollar Day effectively encouraged employees to show up, and to stick around.

Whether by luck or by design, the Five Dollar Day also established one of the foundational principles of modern consumerism: Pay employees enough so that they can afford to buy the products they produce. This, too, is part of what’s happening in China. Foxconn employees want to own iPads and iPhones as well as make them. Economists and environmentalists are having fun contemplating the implications of a shift in individual buying power in China today analogous to that unleashed in America in 1914.

This was pretty much what I expected to find when I started looking into the history of the Five Dollar Day. What I didn’t expect to find was that Henry Ford’s institution of that policy may have been inspired, at least in part, by the Sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It’s an irony of history that a man who loved nature as much as Henry Ford would have so much to do with its destruction. According to biographer Robert Lacey, Ford was a great admirer of the naturalist John Burroughs. He gave Burroughs a Model T in hopes of persuading him that cars, by providing people with means to escape the pestilent cities, would promote rather than undermine the cause of conservation. Burroughs presumably was unconvinced, but he did manage to infuse Ford with his passion for Emerson.

Lacey says the Five Dollar Day reflects in particular the ideas expressed in Emerson’s essay, “Compensation.” Ford often gave copies to friends, and a close associate said it “comes nearer to stating his creed than anything else.” It’s not hard to see why, given that Ford was a billionaire who believed in reincarnation, and who sometimes said he belonged with “the Buddhist crowd.”

“Compensation” distinctly demonstrates the degree to which Emerson’s transcendentalism resonates with Eastern religions. “The true doctrine of omnipresence,” he says in one passage,

“is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.”

In another passage he adds, “The soul is.

“Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself.”

As we used to say in the ’60s, far out.

We know that Steve Jobs was well acquainted with the principles of Zen Buddhism and Hindu mysticism. With the works of Emerson, probably not so much. There’s no mention of Emerson in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, or in several other books on the history of Apple I’ve read. Jobs wasn’t known as a reader (neither was Ford), and I’d guess that “Compensation” would have tried his patience. It’s as abstruse and as silly in spots as Emerson’s other essays, and as wordy. Still, one imagines that if Jobs had read it, he would have recognized its affirmation of some of the cosmic truths he held dear.

Basically “Compensation” is a meditation on what in Eastern terms would be called karma and the interplay between the yin and the yang. The gist of the message is that no one, in the end, gets away with anything. “A perfect equity,” Emerson says, “adjusts its balance in all parts of life …

“Our action is overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in line with the poles of the world.”

The subject of work is directly addressed sporadically, but those mentions are telling. “Human labor,” Emerson says, “through all its forms,

“from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price – and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price – is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature.”

Robert Lacey cites this passage as suggestive of Ford’s realization that he wasn’t enjoying the advantages he could have enjoyed from his assembly line because he wasn’t paying heed to the absolute balance of Give and Take. He wasn’t paying the price.

This isn’t to say that reading Emerson suddenly turned Ford into some gooey-eyed idealist. Many scholars argue that the Five Dollar Day was less about sharing the wealth than it was about gaining control of an unruly workforce. Ford himself described the policy as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” but he also insisted he’d rather make 15,000 families happy than to make 20 or 30 millionaires.

In any event, the Five Dollar Day accomplished its mission, and helped ignite the engine of consumerism that defines, as much as anything, the American character to this day. In that sense Steve Jobs most assuredly carried Ford’s legacy into the 21st century.

It’s impossible to say how Jobs would have responded to the controversies regarding Foxconn that continued to escalate after his death. In a June, 2011 interview, two months before he stepped down as Apple’s CEO, Jobs said he was deeply troubled by Foxconn’s employee suicides, but insisted that Apple was doing “one of the best jobs in our industry and maybe in any industry” of monitoring the working conditions in its supply chain. Even if that’s true, Apple’s critics argue that doing “one of the best jobs in our industry” doesn’t necessarily mean the company is doing enough.

There’s not much evidence, in Isaacson’s biography at least, that during his lifetime Jobs spent a lot of time thinking about the people who assembled his products. There’s endless talk about purity of design and the seamless integration of hardware and software, but no substantive discussion of workers, factories, or China. Foxconn isn’t mentioned at all. I think it’s fair to conclude that Jobs was far more focused on what it feels like to use the iPod, the iPad, and the Mac than he was in what it feels like to make them. His talent lay in empathizing with his customers, not with his factory workers.

It would be unfair to expect Jobs to have been all things to all people. Like everyone else, he had his strengths and his weaknesses. Still, it’s regrettable that a man who believed so strongly in the holistic integrity of Apple’s products, inside and out, seems to have paid relatively little attention to the human beings who literally bring those products into the world.

In his better moments Jobs had to have realized, if he allowed himself to think about it, that there’s an inherent karmic imbalance in the production of Apple’s products. The devices he shepherded so carefully to market promise to open paths of individual freedom and creativity. That’s why he believed they made the world a better place, and that’s why we love them. The revelations about the working conditions at Foxconn remind us that individual freedom and creativity are not the values that prevail on the assembly line.

As consumers, most of us give far less thought to what it’s like to work on the line than Steve Jobs probably did. Our disinterest ignores Emerson’s absolute law of Give and Take. “Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they,” he said. “If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own.”

Associated photo on home and category pages: Old Five Dollar Bill – 1934 by Kevin Krejci, on Flickr

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AMC’s “Mad Men” returns in March, but already the advertising for this show about advertising has successfully stirred a bit of controversy.

I refer to the video teasers and posters that exploit the Falling Man motif of the show’s opening title sequence. The vertiginous imagery is controversial because it evokes, intentionally or not, one of the most harrowing news photographs ever taken: that of the “falling man” plunging to his death from the World Trade Center on 9/11.

I’m a fan of “Mad Men,” but I’m also among those who find the title sequence disturbing. That’s not because of any personal connection to 9/11, I don’t think, although as a longtime resident of New York, it hits close enough. The source of my reaction is the power of the Falling Man photograph itself.

I’m not the first to observe that the Falling Man image is evocative on at least two visceral levels. It captures, in an excruciatingly personal way, the literal terror of 9/11. It also captures what it feels like, existentially, to be living in a world of radical uncertainty. The source of our anxiety isn’t only terrorism, although that’s part of it now. It’s about a loss of psychic footing in a world of overwhelming change.

Critics have noted an infatuation in contemporary culture with nostalgia. This isn’t surprising, given the degree of change that’s subsumed us lately, and that’s subsumed us ever since Watt introduced his steam engine. The past, unlike the present, offers something to hold onto. No accident that even as the Industrial Revolution raged around them, Victorians celebrated medieval chivalry and piety, lounging in drawing rooms that excluded, as Lewis Mumford put it, “every hint of the machine.” World War I brutally ended any illusion that the machine could be kept at bay, an awakening depicted on the current season of PBS’ “Downton Abbey.”

“Mad Men” gets terrific mileage out of nostalgia, but we also enjoy knowing a secret the show’s characters mostly don’t: that their world is about to be turned upside down. Executive producer Matthew Weiner suggested in a recent interview that the dislocating effects of change may be “Mad Men’s” most important underlying theme. Specifically he noted the plaintive question asked by a character in the third season: “When is everything going to get back to normal?”

We know that change has been a constant of human affairs, of course, but we also know that technology has amplified the pace and scale of change exponentially. It’s interesting that Alvin Toffler’s concept of “future shock” doesn’t get talked about much any more, despite the fact that the acceleration of technological change responsible for that state of psychological dislocation has, as he predicted, only increased in the decades since he coined the phrase. Would-be tech billionaires are fond of bragging that the application or device they’re selling promises to be the most truly “disruptive” technology to come along since Google and Facebook, but even if they succeed they’ll soon be looking over their shoulders for the next disruptive technology coming round the bend, as Google and Facebook already are.

In one form or another, the Falling Man has become the archetypical figure of the technological era, spinning his way into space from a center that cannot hold. A standard-bearer of Gilded Age displacement was Henry Adams, who in the opening pages of his autobiography described himself wondering:

“What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth? … No such accident had ever happened before in human experience. For him, alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.”

Adams was far from alone, but it was no surprise he felt that way. Isolation is another symptom of the psychology of modernism — and another primary theme of “Mad Men,” according to Matthew Weiner. The 19th century versions of “future shock” were Marx’s “alienation” and Durkheim’s “anomie.” In 1897 Durkheim published a study on the alarming rise in the number of suicides across Europe, a rise he attributed to the “morbid disturbance” caused by “the brilliant development of sciences, the arts and industry of which we are the witnesses.” The work of centuries, he said, “cannot be remade in a few years.”

We’re often told that in order to maintain some semblance of balance in the world technology has made, we have to get used to the fact that everything is never going to get back to normal. So it is that the nostalgic appeal of “Mad Men” is precisely equivalent to that of “Downton Abbey”: We get to watch complacently as complacency is overturned.

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Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison for conducting a murderous terror campaign he’d hoped would overthrow the kingdom of technology. There can be no more dramatic testimony to the failure of that campaign than the orgy of eulogies accorded Jobs.

Still, beneath their obvious differences, there’s a connection between Kaczynski and Jobs, not between them personally but between the archetypes they’ve come to represent.

The emotional reactions to Jobs’ passing made it abundantly clear that for many of us he’d come to symbolize the hopeful, life-affirming potential of the technical arts, in the process buttressing our faith in technology as a vehicle of human progress.

Kaczynski, by contrast, seemed a creature who’d emerged from the depths of our subconscious, a malignant manifestation of our fears that technology is not our friend but our enemy, and that our enemy is gaining the upper hand. Several commentators argued that Kaczynski disturbed us in part because we share a measure of his fear, and of his anger. Robert Wright wrote in Time magazine that “there’s a little bit of the Unabomber in all of us.” Daniel J. Kevles made essentially the same point in the The New Yorker; his essay appeared under the headline, “E Pluribus Unabomber.” Alton Chase, in his biography of Kaczynski, suggested that the Unabomber Manifesto articulated in hyperbolic terms the same sort of earth-friendly sentiments that embrace organic vegetables, camping, and the Prius. Minus the violence, Chase said, the Manifesto represented “nothing less than the American creed.”

That’s a vast overstatement, I think, but it does speak to the incongruity I’m driving at here. Jobs and Kaczynski represent the extreme poles of a deep-seated ambivalence in our attitudes toward technology. That ambivalence has been a part of American history, and part of the American psyche, since the beginning.

Thomas Jefferson set the pattern. Jefferson argued passionately for a national economy based on the wholesome integrity of the family farm. Dependence on manufactures, he wrote, “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” But Jefferson also installed a host of inventions at Monticello and marveled at the wonders of industrial power in England. He loved nature but found it impossible to resist the fruits of abundance and power technology offered. Jefferson’s oscillations on technology, said the historian Leo Marx, represent “decisive contradictions in our culture and in ourselves.”

The same contradictions flavored the nation’s pursuit of Manifest Destiny. The dominant theme was that technology was the spearhead of civilization, the essential tool for taming the savage frontier. At the same time, a less confident undercurrent whispered that the possibilities of human freedom were vanishing even as the glories of nature were being despoiled. Contemporary accounts quoted by Henry Nash Smith demonstrate how both perspectives were projected onto the personality of Daniel Boone, who was alternately portrayed as “the angelic Spirit of Enterprise,” paving the way for decency and prosperity, or as a paragon of lonely rectitude, moving ever westward, ahead of the madding crowd. “I had not been two years at the licks [in Missouri],” Boone was said to have complained, “before a d–d Yankee came, and settled down within a hundred miles of me!!”

This discordant medley of enthusiasm and regret would subsequently be echoed in the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the Westerns of John Ford. In both, a self-reliant frontiersman typically served as a bridge between wild nature and community, often demonstrating that for all the gains civilization brought, something noble and pure was being lost. Still later the same sorts of tensions would appear in the public images of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, who were revered not only for their achievements in technology, but also for having managed to turn the trick of becoming rich and famous while retaining the homespun virtues of small town boys.

Steve Jobs and Ted Kaczynski — I’m talking about the individuals now, not the archetypes — were both products of the 1960s counterculture, and the spectacular divergence of their subsequent careers testifies to the depth of the counterculture’s bifurcated views on technology. Yes, the ’60s were a time of getting real and getting back to the land, but they were also an era of changing consciousness with the help of high-powered sound systems and LSD. Whether Kaczynski ever dropped acid I don’t know, but he certainly dropped out. And although his Manifesto showed that he was filled with hatred for much of what the ’60s stood for, it’s also true that his views on technology were shaped by some of the counterculture’s favorite intellectuals, Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse among them.

Jobs regularly cited as seminal influences in his youth LSD and the “Whole Earth Catalog.” Certainly, Stewart Brand’s counterculture bible captured the era’s eclecticism in regard to machines: readers regularly found woodstoves and potter’s wheels featured alongside books on cybernetics and space stations. In that context, it makes perfect sense that, as Walter Isaacson’s biography reveals, Jobs tried for nine months to treat his pancreatic cancer with fruit juices and herbal remedies before seeking out the most technologically advanced medical treatments he could find.

If Steve Jobs and Thomas Jefferson can be ambivalent about technology, I guess any of us can. That’s where Ted Kaczynski took a more radical path, a path of madness. You can’t separate good technologies from bad technologies, he said. Buying into the Internet and artificial intelligence means also buying into nuclear meltdowns, eugenics, and global warming. Technology aims inexorably in one direction only: totalitarianism, the eradication of nature and the subjugation of human beings.

Kaczynski’s madness came not so much in the logic of that philosophy — similar views have been endorsed by plenty of respectable people, including Ellul and Marcuse — as it did in his insistence on trying to force everyone else to adhere to it. His contempt for compromise was deep. When it comes to technology, he scornfully said, people want to have their cake and eat it, too. To which generations of Americans have replied, “Who wouldn’t?”

By that I mean that we lust for the gifts technology bestows while overlooking, as best we can, its degradations. We love the mobility our cars provide, but keeping them filled with gas has gotten us into all sorts of trouble, and suburban sprawl is a nightmare. I wouldn’t want to give up my iPad, my Android, my Xbox, or my plasma TV, but the people who make them in China seem to be getting a pretty bad deal, and don’t ask me where they end up when I throw them away.

Our Jobsian side smiles confidently and says, “Relax! Technology will provide us with solutions to all those problems — give it time.” To which our Kaczynski side scowls and snarls that technology doesn’t solve problems, it creates them. Trying to extricate ourselves with more machinery only serves to dig the hole we’re in that much deeper.

Technological schizophrenia: It’s an American tradition.

Photos: iPhone 4s via Apple; Kaczynski’s cabin via Singularity Symposium

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• The abandonment of technology

His remarks came in the course of delivering the prestigious MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. While he aimed for the most part at reassuring the high-level executives in his audience that they have nothing to fear from the coming merger of the Internet with TV, Schmidt also made a point of chastising British schools for inadequately promoting technological literacy.

English scientists have invented three of the most powerful technologies the world has ever seen, Schmidt said — photography, television, and computers — yet England has failed to maintain global leadership in any of those fields. A principal reason for that failure, he said, has been “a drift to the humanities” in the curricula of British schools. The nation lacked the expertise required to capitalize on its innovations because engineering and science education hadn’t been “championed.”

Schmidt added that over the past century the United Kingdom had stopped nurturing its “polymaths,” meaning individuals who can successfully span the gap between science and art. The result is a distinct and hostile split among young people who position themselves on either side of that gap, and who refer unflatteringly to one another, Schmidt said he’s learned, as “boffins” and “luvvies,” respectively.

Given that the attention of computer executives is directed relentlessly forward, Schmidt may not have realized that he was echoing with remarkable fealty the language and logic of a debate that has been repeatedly engaged on British soil literally since the onset of the Scientific Revolution, and that has continued among American educators for more than a century.

When Francis Bacon proposed his famed scientific method in 1620 he did so with a specific agenda: to replace what he saw as the fruitless musings of the Greek philosophers with experimentation that would produce knowledge of practical use to humankind. The ancient philosophers, Bacon wrote, were “prone to talking, and incapable of generation, their wisdom being loquacious and unproductive of effects.”

Bacon’s call for practical science was soon taken up by a host of followers, but it was also resisted by those who felt the classic philosophers remained the fonts of true wisdom. This became known as the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns. The standard argument of the Ancients was that the Moderns could only see as far as they did because they stood “on the shoulders of giants.” The Ancients also shared the conviction of their heroes that the products of techné would always threaten to become ends in themselves, overwhelming the pursuit of virtue. Among those who took up the Ancients’ cause was Jonathan Swift, light-heartedly in “The Battle of the Books,” more mordantly in “Gulliver’s Travels.”

Despite the success of the scientific method, the ancient philosophers remained the mainstays of traditional pedagogy during the ensuing two centuries. The assault on that tradition was renewed as the Industrial Revolution flowered, notably in an 1880 lecture by Thomas Henry Huxley. Known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his aggressive defense of evolutionary theory against its religious opponents, Huxley spoke on the occasion of the opening of Mason Science College in Birmingham, one of the first institutions of higher learning in England where the study of the natural sciences was explicitly given priority over study of the humanities. Huxley favored that shift enthusiastically. “For I hold very strongly by two convictions,” he said. “The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject-matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education.”

The poet Matthew Arnold rose to the defense of the classics in an address at Cambridge University two years later. Huxley was mistaken, Arnold said, if he believed that educational tradition necessarily excluded the teaching of natural science. Well-educated persons will be conversant with the science of Newton as well as the philosophy of Plato — they will be, in other words, polymaths. Arnold insisted nonetheless that most people simply aren’t interested in the minutia of scientific processes. What most of us hunger for, he said, is to understand beauty, meaning, and right relationship with other human beings. These were subjects in which the classic philosophers had no peers.

The most obvious predecessor to Eric Schmidt’s remarks was C. P. Snow’s famous “Two Cultures” speech in 1959, also delivered at Cambridge University. Snow, a physicist turned novelist, mourned the fact that “a gulf of mutual incomprehension” had developed between the world of literature and the world of science. “Thirty years ago,” Snow said, “the cultures had long ceased to speak to each other: but at least they managed a kind of frozen smile across the gulf. Now the politeness has gone and they just make faces.”

Snow went on to attack his literary friends for their insularity, much as Bacon had attacked the ancient Greeks for theirs. Scientists were constantly searching for discoveries that would alleviate suffering in the world, Snow said, paving the way for a brighter future. Literary types, by contrast, acted as if they “wished the future did not exist.”

Although Schmidt in his speech urged the nurturance of polymaths, it was clear that he was most concerned about the science side of the equation. He mentioned with approval President Obama’s proposal last June for a stimulus program that would train 10,000 new American engineers annually. For the United Kingdom’s economy to thrive in the digital future, Schmidt said, its schools need to “reignite” students’ interest in science and math, just as its businesses need to hire engineers at all levels, including the very top. Google has followed that policy and prospered.

Few noticed a telling moment in Schmidt’s talk that — unintentionally, I’m sure — put a somewhat different spin on that message. It came just after he’d been introduced, when he departed from his written script to mention the news of Steve Jobs’ resignation. What he said may have confused his audience, since he referred to a section of his speech he hadn’t yet delivered, the section in which he talked about the need to nurture polymaths who could bridge the gap between art and science. Jobs, Schmidt said, “was the only person I’ve ever known who has been able to actually merge the two worlds completely, with an artist’s eye as well as the definition of what great engineering is … From my perspective that’s the perfect example of the kind of union we should see in the future in other companies and other collaborations.”

Schmidt, who holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a masters and Ph.D in computer science, didn’t mention that Jobs had hardly followed a boffins’ standard career path, having dropped out of one of America’s most artsy liberal arts colleges to seek enlightenment in India. The moment was telling because it provoked an unavoidable comparison between Schmidt’s workmanlike presentation in Edinburgh and the fabled charisma of Jobs, and also between the creative imagination that Jobs brought to Apple’s products and the incredibly powerful but ultimately mechanical algorithms that drive the Google juggernaut.

Schmidt’s description of Jobs as the only person he’d ever known who completely merged the worlds of technology and art testifies to the difficulty of achieving such a merger. This is not to say that creativity doesn’t exist at every level of technical enterprise. Technology is art — sometimes good, sometimes not so good — just as art is technique. And of course the argument can be made that technology advances rather than retards the humanities in countless ways.

Nonetheless, the tension between what Hannah Arendt described as the vita activa and the vita contemplativa is a constant in our personal as well our professional lives. Like Schmidt, we long for a harmonious mixture of the two. The evidence over the centuries suggests the struggle will be ongoing.

Schmidt’s full MacTaggart lecture is available in the following video. His aside about Steve Jobs begins at the 9:28 mark. His critique of the UK education system begins at 41:40.

Associated illustration on home and category pages: Science clip art by Vintage Collective, on Flickr

Related:

• Full text of Eric Schmidt’s 2011 MacTaggart lecture
• The abandonment of technology