Helping One’s ‘Self’: The Great Controversy of Cutlery

"[T]echnology—in the much more limited, much more Greek sense of craftsmanship—might be not only harmless, and be not merely useful, but be a help to being ourselves."

From The European Conservative

By Erik Dahlberg⃰

It is man's nature to make art of nature.

A few decades ago, and still kicking about in more American right-wing circles, the discussion of ‘bioethics’ took on national proportions. George W. Bush himself initiated a President’s Council of Bioethics, stacked with then-rockstar intellectuals such as Michael Sandel, Francis Fukuyama, and Leon Kass. The general message was, predictably, “No!”—with more or less embarrassed Biblical footnotes. ‘Transhumanism,’ one of the concerns of these bioethicists, is probably less a concept than a rhetorical device or the name for a vague cultural atmosphere, much like ‘globalism.’ The recent TERF wars have sparked renewed interest in the body and its malleability. J.K. Rowling is certainly an able rhetorician, and Mary Harrington has written what is almost a natural theology of the anatomy, even seeking to recast the post-war consensus on the pill.

There is likely little more exciting to 20th and 21st century political theorists than words like ‘embodied,’ ‘subjectivity,’ or ‘intersubjectivity.’ One really must control oneself. And it is certainly dramatic to write about transhumanism or cyborgs in Blade Runner-sounding jeremiads. What I want to present in the following is not more conceptual weed-killing. Rather, I want to suggest, in very undramatic terms, why technology—in the much more limited, much more Greek sense of craftsmanship—might be not only harmless, and be not merely useful, but be a help to being ourselves.

The knife and fork are not simply miniature swords and tridents, for protecting the realm or for staging little Poseidon nativity plays, but matters of style. “Style,” as not Oscar Wilde but Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon said, “is the man himself.” There are lots of ways of taking this, assuming one is like me and hasn’t actually read Buffon. The way which interests me is the emphasis on ornamentation. Knives and forks change the way we look to each other, so much so that we cannot bear their absence. And, looking backwards, at their first introduction into our Western European corner of the world they received notoriety. The 11th century Italian monk Peter Damian, speaking for the Church, said that man already had “natural forks” in his fingers. We have the eastern princess, Theophanu, wife of Otto II, to thank for luring us out of our poor taste.

To take a larger example, consider something like Crossness Pumping Station. This is, not so appetisingly, a sewage station. It isn’t the first place one thinks of for the hosting of cocktail parties or of posh functions. And yet it looks magnificent, as so many in fact do. Crossness Pumping Station is, I think, like a larger version of the knife and fork. The point of its architectural beauty is the painting over a natural necessity. We have to go to the loo, so why not do so in style?

Photo by Peter Scrimshaw, CC BY-SA 4.0

This is not a concern about hygiene, any more than the knife and fork are a concern for eating. To take away the ornamentation of the knife and fork, and to render them with an industrial simplicity, is to beg the question. (Sadly, this is a question frequently begged in modern Sweden, and embodied in the cheerless necessity of IKEA’s cutlery: social democracy on a plate.) Peter Damian would, I think, have something more of a point in a world where the forks are all plain and dull. But the point of the fork is not fundamentally to make eating easier, but to make eating into a matter of style. Naturally, I can’t afford particularly nice looking forks. But I wish I could afford them. And I show that I wish so, because I try my best to eat with manners. Ornamentation is simply the extension of manners. But manners are not the simple, uncomplicated things of unhappy bigotry.

One of the interesting things which might follow from this sort of thinking is the idea that style is a matter of personality. Or, in other words, style is an attempt to live a more than necessary life, which is what having a personality is. Eating, sleeping, and the matters of the lavatory belong to squirrels as well as to men. But it is man’s nature to make art of nature. Cutlery is used, in part, to take so much food as can be chewed with the mouth closed. And the point of this is to make the face visible. Conversation can flow without invasively percussive mastication, and so the whole meal becomes stylised. Almost everything interesting about mealtimes is reflected in the company, but the company is chosen for the style it occasions. After all, who needs friends?

Cutlery and palatial sewage works are efforts at distraction, but they are also in this sense facilitators. Cutlery makes an effort to keep the conditions of conversation maximally available, and the beauty of Crossness Pumping Station is partly to avoid sticking out. That is to say, the flow of the orderly street is not of an unending, formless lengthiness, but a repeating pattern which, easy on the eye, offers a style in which to live. It would be too much to call a street an equivalent to a conversation, but a building which is ugly is, especially when in proximity to beautiful houses, like someone chewing with their mouth open at a dinner party.

Ornamentation can, precisely in distracting, seek to give emphasis to something else. Blusher, like the cut of a suit, are amplifications of features of a figure. They are exaggerations of nature, namely the bits of nature we wish to exaggerate. This is half the matter. The other half, which is the other kind of amplification, is the signalling of membership. A uniform does this in a strong way, but usually it is the important sculpting conducted in choosing to wear such-and-such a quarter zip. We choose a ‘look,’ which is a way of engaging the world. And we recognise it as that way, or that ‘look,’ because the clothing has been worn and worn into a style. The clothing is a walking institution. Through it we become ourselves.

I have sought to provide some loose expression to the idea that technology, considered as a craft, is not necessarily about efficiency, but sometimes its opposite. Rather than seeking to be efficient, and to expedite the necessary, we paint over the necessary face we wish to show. Cutlery, sewage, and quarter zip are matters of style. And style is more than necessary, just like we are.

A Political Note

One of the misconceptions in America, which may be its defining misconception, is the idea that order exists only to keep us safe. Of course, this is part of what order does. And a pessimism about man’s nature is a core part of political wisdom. But enough has been written about this for it to be useless for me to pronounce usefully upon it. The other point of order is to make us ourselves. This conception is not of ‘order’ in the steely sense of a trusted state possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. It is a conception of order as culture. Culture is an arrangement of style.

In order for the gesture of the hand, or of the blazer, or of architectural ornament to be understood, it must exist in a shared framework of symbols. Without this framework, the achievement of meaning is impossible.

⃰Erik Dahlberg was a military engineer of Stormaktstiden, the Swedish “Era of Great Power.” But despite his exploits, including the daring march across the frozen Sound to take Copenhagen in 1658, he never wrote for The European Conservative. The Dahlberg you have just read is in fact a Cambridge student expressing political opinions from the safety of his nom de guerre.

Pictured: The interior of Crossness Pumping Station, London Borough of Bexley