Modern Times and Ancient Truths

Eighty-nine years ago this month, the film Modern Times, starring Charlie Chaplin, was released. Considered one of the greatest movies ever, it was a comedic but savage critique of industrial capitalism and a prescient indictment of the alienated modern life to come, as Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, worked on an assembly line where he suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and repetitive nature of the work.

But the film ends on a hopeful note, as the Little Tramp and his beloved Ellen hit the road and walk away from the mechanized life. It is a poetic call to replace the iron discipline of the machine life with rebellious spontaneity.

In All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (Basic Books, 1988), Stuart Ewen writes:

In Modern Times we confront a factory world which increasingly usurps human initiative. Within the scope of the film, people are trapped beneath the thumb of productivity, their bodies and souls shaped and overwhelmed by the assembly line. The priorities of such a world submerge human needs; misery and homelessness abound. People are seen as useful only if they can be plugged into the productive apparatus. Otherwise they are tossed aside like garbage.

Today, the Little Tramp, has been replaced by big Trump and his sidekick, Elon Musk, owners and operators of the new AI Digital factory Internet system, posing as saviors of the Little Tramp.

Just the other day, Musk, with an imagined twinkle in his eye and little boy grin, tweeted out on his bullhorn X (Twitter): “We are on the event horizon of the singularity.”

By the “Singularity” is meant the time when the machines – computers and artificial intelligence – exceed human control and dominate society. For technologists like Musk and his ilk in and out of government and in Silicon Valley, the idea of a machine run world is heaven on earth. A place where death will be defeated by synthetic means and love reduced to a passionless technique.

This is the myth of the machine that has grown from a superstitious cult to a world-wide religion with the cell phone its cult object.

*

Up in the lake and down in the river the ice is breaking up. In the house a few little black bugs have appeared. The maple sap is running. And we have seen flocks of robins and cedar waxwings eating leftover berries that have clung to the bare ruined choirs of the trees and bushes. Even the turkey vultures have returned to perch everywhere, looking down like caring teachers over students’ desks, as if to say – wake up, look around, these are resurrection days.

*

By the late 1980s, the “Little Tramp” was pitching computers for IBM in a series of advertisements. His problems were again portrayed as caused by industrial chaos, but as Ewen writes:

But this time the solution is different. Beleaguered Charlie is saved by the computer, the quintessential modern instrument of order, control, surveillance. Here the frenetic conditions of modern life are solved by modern technology. The 1936 film had pointed an idealistic way out. The ad points the way back in. The critique has been turned on its head, packaged and used against itself.

Now the “smart phone” is sold as the way out and the way in, as resurrection battles singularity.

*

Even the bears are waking up around here. A guy I know said that on his way home the other night he saw one walking down Main Street. Now this is a nice little tourist town in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, not a town in northern Canada, so I was a bit surprised by his sighting. It became somewhat clearer after I asked him where he was coming from and he said he had been down in The Well, a local bar, having a few drinks with an old girlfriend who had told him he had always been her true love but she had to marry the local police chief for protection. Confused, he asked her what did she need protection from. When she said – life, and got up and said good night, he ordered another round. Soon after that the bear appeared.

*

Now we have crossed over to a country led by a man and his sidekick so sick that no words are needed. Their use of artificial intelligence is fulfilling the dream of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian fascist, friend of Mussolini, and founder of the art movement called futurism, whose claim was that “the entire human drama revolves around the machine.” It was a ruse for power cached within an artistic manifesto based on the belief that the machine was the new god with supernatural powers beyond human control – very similar to AI and the alleged final coming of the singularity. “War,” said Marinetti, “is the father of all things…the culminating and perfecting synthesis of progress.”

Anyone who thinks this is what it means to Make America Great Again had better think quick – you have been deluded. This video is a shocking, psychopathic, and fitting result of years of U.S. supported genocide in Gaza.

*

I look forward to Ash Wednesday on March 5, the day on which as a young man I went to church to have the priest rub ashes on my forehead and say, “Remember, Ed, that you are dust and back to dust you will return.”

I no longer go to the priests, but I will still feel the ashes and those sacred words. I will do so on a little tramp up by the lake and into the woods, where perhaps I will detect the tracks of that bear my friend saw walking through town. He exists in us all.

And the night before that walk, I will drink deeply from the well – what my father learned to call “the smiles” from his Irish Uncle Tim, a blacksmith for the NY Fire Department, who so called the Irish whiskey he drank – and I will smile, knowing I will die with the winter and be resurrected in the spring as the sap rises.

It is Resurrection time, and despite the machine people, God rises in us all as we resist their machine dreams, and rejoice.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.

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