People used to ride on horses as their primary means of distance travel. Camels, elephants, and donkeys were also used for the same purpose in other parts of the world. This is not accidental. The horse does not accidentally have the shape and strength to be ridden by people. God designed the animal with the understanding that it would be a means for human travel. Part of what a horse is is “that on which men travel”. Even the Lord, when he returns with his blood drenched robe and flaming eyes, will be riding a white horse as will his white-robed army.
But most people no longer ride horses and for those that do, it is usually recreational, not a means of transportation. Instead, they drive cars. The partnership between man and animal that was arranged at their creation is thus neglected.
It is quite mistaken to believe that a car is straightforwardly superior to a horse. The trade from one to the other is just that – a trade with trade-offs. This is important to understand. An evolutionary view of history might say that man has progressed from walking, to riding horses, to horse-drawn carriages, to cars, to airplanes, to spaceships. Perhaps the next major step will be Star Trek style teleportation. But this presentation of things – their arrangement in this order, implies the superiority of the later things. I am disagreeing with that and saying that we have traded apples for oranges (or perhaps tennis balls), not lead for gold.
The first and simplest aspect of this exchange is that each has a unique set of pros and cons. A car is faster and performs more consistently than a horse. Cars do not reproduce. A car cannot be powered on grass. A car pollutes the air instead of fertilizing the earth. A horse needs space while a car can be parked in a garage. A horse can walk almost anywhere while a car needs roads. A horse must be kept warm while a car can keep you warm. I could keep going. The point is that the car is not straightforwardly better. An exchange has been made, not from slow to fast, but from one incalculable list of pros and cons to a second incalculable list of pros and cons.
The second aspect of this exchange is the moral difference. Though a horse can be bought and sold, it is more than just a tool. A man who strikes his car hurts no one but himself. But if a man strikes his horse unjustly, he has done something immoral. One can leave a car alone in a garage indefinitely. To tie up a horse indefinitely is cruel. So the exchange of horse for car has removed a moral dimension from life. The ability to act in a moral (or even immoral) way has been removed from an aspect of the car owner’s life.
The ability to love a living thing has also been removed. One can have a horse as a friend, but no one can have a car as a friend. Even if one is inclined to be sentimental about man-made things, they are in no way the same category. Your horse knows, trusts, and loves you. A car does nothing.
Third, there is a semiotic difference. Imagine a huge bronze statue of a horse. Now imagine a huge bronze statue of a car. Why does that juxtaposition feel odd? Why is it slightly funny? Ferrari uses the symbol of a horse. I would be greatly surprised if any horse breeders use the symbol of a Ferrari. A horse means something – something that can’t be completely expressed in words. Its meaning is richer and deeper than whatever a sports car means. Thus to ride a horse is to commit a more significant act. It is inherently more meaningful. Riding a horse is “more epic” than driving a car.
I want to take a second pass at those three aspects and expand them a bit.
First, in terms of the exchange of pros and cons, the exchange is not limited to the thing itself, but a whole network of things. Instead of hitching posts, we have parking lots. Instead of feed stores, we have gas stations. Instead of trails, we have roads. Instead of vets, we have mechanics. I suppose the equine counterparts of auto manufacturing and the petroleum industry would be breeders and farmers.
Second, there is a weird substitute for moral treatment of horses that surrounds our transportation – traffic laws. A man attuned to the law of God written on his heart will know not to beat his horse, trample his neighbor’s dog, or allow his neighbor on a horse to cross the road. But no such inner knowledge suggests that he ought to stop at a stop sign or limit his speed when he drives a car. So it’s a bit unclear exactly what has happened. We’ve lost the opportunity for straightforward moral behavior with the loss of the horse. But the domain hasn’t become totally amoral either. With our substitute horse, we have had to create a substitute morality by fiat which bears little relationship to what any inner desire to do good would prompt. If I speed, I may have broken a law, but I have not committed an inherently immoral act. I don’t necessarily grow in virtue by not passing another driver on the shoulder of the road.
A horse has symbolic power. The horse as a symbol is not as simple as a metaphor for strength or freedom. It is horse-likeness. Cars cannot possess the same semiotic weight. So two things happen when we reject horses for cars. We are detached from the first hand knowledge of a symbolic thing and thus also lose insight into its use as a symbol. We also change our experience of the act of transportation because of its now impoverished meaning.
Comparing a horse to a car has just been a single instance. Nearly the whole world has been replaced by a network of synthetic counterparts of real things. A similar comparison could be made between subsistence farming and corporate employment. Living basically indoors as opposed to outdoors. It extends to small things. We peel ad-splattered foil yogurt lids from plastic containers instead of peeling yellow bananas. God gave the plants their own packaging. The problem is not that manufactured packaging exists, but that it has become a replacement – that it is more normal than nature.
The proliferation of branding seems to have grown into a region vacated by the semiotics of nature. A tree, mountain, horse, river, desert, sunset, hawk, or pebble have some meaning beyond themselves. Somehow, brands, Coke for example, have been able to synthesize a meaning for themselves greater than the simple physicality of the product.
In spite of all this, I don’t think I’m against technology, even advanced technology. The problem is not that such things exist, but that they are normal. To take an airplane to another continent may feel fundamentally unnatural, but the occasional flight shouldn’t disturb one’s fundamental sense of reality. Life becomes disturbing (in both senses) when this synthetic environment becomes difficult to escape.
I think these are the reasons that the world feels fake sometimes.