Perhaps the Means Justifies the Means

Exitus acta probat. The ends justifies the deed (or the means). 

This is the motto on George Washington's family coat of arms, and it is believed to be the first American President's defense of the bloodshed it took to win the Revolutionary War. With the advantage of hindsight, it's easy to agree with our founding father on this point in this context.

But I'm beginning to wonder lately whether, culturally, we've taken that idea past its logical extremes. I'm beginning to wonder whether we're so consumed by the ends that we've lost sight of the significance of the means. And I don't just mean for wars or other big decisions that put human lives at risk, I mean for smaller, daily decisions that put our very humanity at risk.

In the foreword to Jacues Ellul's analysis of the effects of our increasingly technical culture, The Technological Society (1964), Robert Mertom wrote:

By technique [Ellul] means far more than machine technology. Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized. The Technical Man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices into motion. He cannot help admiring the spectacular effectiveness of nuclear weapons of war. Above all, he is committed to the never-ending search for "the one best way" to achieve any designated objective.

Ours is a progressively technological civilization: by this Ellus means that the ever-expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It is a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. Indeed, technique transforms ends into means. What was once prized in its own right now becomes worthwhile only if it helps achieve something else. And conversely, technique turns means into ends. "Know-how" takes on an ultimate value. [emphasis mine]

The problem that even Ellul couldn't have predicted back in 1964 is how hyper-connected we've become, which has only served to decrease how carefully our ends can be examined. Yesterday in his New York Times column Thomas Friedman noted:

Something really big happened in the world’s wiring in the last decade, but it was obscured by the financial crisis and post-9/11. We went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. I’m always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speech broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago when I wrote a book called “The World Is Flat.” All of that came since then, and the combination of these tools of connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.

And Friedman notes how this new hyperconnectively is really a good thing for people who are self-motivated. They can get things done with speeds unimagined before. But getting things done is a good thing only so long as the ends to those means are a carefully considered (i.e., good) thing. Moving at light speed for its own sake, and with the casting aside of nonproductive things that moving so quickly requires, is a path to guaranteed regret.

Just last weekend, I had a conversation with a high school classmate I hadn't seen in many years, and we realized we both had come to a similar conclusion. Between the time we left high school and just recently, we had been so focused on achieving our life's goals, we stopped doing some of the things that we really enjoyed (for her it was making ceramics; for me it was playing tennis and piano). After taking them back up again, we were both not only very pleased with the pleasure they brought us, but a bit upset we had ever stopped doing them. Yes, we had accomplished a lot in the interceding years, but these "means" toward a happier life had been put aside quite foolishly we realized. The means toward achieving our goals could have/should have been more balanced with the things we love doing.

Someone recently shared a quote from Leonard Cohen, who reportedly said "Success is survival" (and he should know). When you stand back and look at the short-lived "success" stories of people who climbed to a certain height only to then drop off the other side and disappear altogether, Cohen's definition rings true. And if survival is the "ends," then how you climb, so much more so than how quickly you get to an imagined "top," would seem to be everything.