Zen and the Art of Campervan Maintenance

Bringing attention back to the journey.

One of the great philosophical puzzles of technology is that while we make technology, it – at least in some respects – also makes us. 

What I mean by this is that technology acts as an external force in our lives, encouraging us to think and behave in certain ways.  

This idea might strike you as strange or wrongheaded, since we are, of course, technology’s creators. Even so, this does not mean that we have absolute control over our creations. Indeed, since the 1950s philosophers of technology have tended to argue that technology is not simply a neutral means to our ends. On the contrary – they argue – the effects of technology turn back on us, shaping those very ends. 

This means that technology is no specialist scientific concern, but in fact a matter of ethical and existential significance for us all. After all, if technology shapes who we are, and we use technological devices every day, then it ought to feature in the big philosophical and spiritual question of how to live.

To explore and justify this line of thinking let me illustrate it with a personal example.

Silver machine

A few weeks ago my wife and I bought a campervan. Not an eye-wateringly expensive, brand new, all-mod-cons campervan, but instead a rough and ready one that’s almost as old as I am. It has some quirks, and a few rust spots here and there, but – hopefully! – has plenty of life yet and adventures to come.  

Driving it around the last few weeks has been an interesting experience because it contrasts so completely with our car. Whereas our car is quick to accelerate, corners gracefully, and is happiest blasting along the German Autobahns it was designed for, the campervan is quite the opposite: trundling along, you can feel the frustration of other drivers having to wait an age while I take corners at walking speed.

Here’s the thing, though: the vehicles, so different in their capabilities, demand to be driven differently. As a result, I become a different driver when I’m in them. 

When I drive my car I get frustrated with traffic lights and other drivers, because I feel like these are unnecessary constraints on my speed. I believe that I should be getting where I need to go more quickly than I actually am and that the reason I’m not making good time is the fault of other people. In short, my car makes me a more impatient and selfish person than I usually am.

Devices and focal things

The philosopher and sociologist Albert Borgmann nicely explains the forces at play here. According to Borgmann, technological objects can be divided into two broad categories: devices and focal things.

Devices are those technologies that aim to achieve a result through maximum availability and minimal effort. Put another way, when we make use of a device we are typically uninvolved in its workings, just interested in the output. One of Borgmann’s examples of a device is a central heating system, which is controlled at the flick of a switch and works in a way that I, as its user, scarcely understand. All I am interested in is my house getting warmer, and ideally, the central heating system itself fades into the background of my attention as it achieves this result.

By contrast, a focal thing facilitates a richer engagement with the world. It is certainly technological, but it’s not just a means to an end – rather it’s inextricably linked to our wider concerns with other people and the world around us. 

Borgmann’s example is a fireplace or domestic hearth. Far from fading into the background of my awareness, a fireplace involves my active attention if I’m to build and keep a fire burning in it. In this way, it is a focus – quite literally, since the Latin word ‘focus’ originally referred to a domestic hearth. Moreover, it is a focus not only for me but for anyone else in the household, since its heat only emanates so far – unlike the central heating system, which distributes heat around the house. 

The consequence is that the fireplace both involves and gathers human beings, whereas the central heating system unburdens and disperses them.

Runnin’ down a dream

Borgmann thinks that over the last century, our lives have become increasingly oriented around devices, at the expense of focal things. He says, moreover, that this is a bad thing because having a great many devices at our disposal risks our disengagement from the wider world. While they promise labour-saving convenience, devices also threaten to lead us away from meaningful relations with nature and other people.

This is, I think, what is happening in my use of my different vehicles. My car is built entirely around speed, meaning that when I can’t get from A to B as fast as I’d like I get frustrated. Moreover, the car’s effortless functionality means that I rarely actually think about how I’m operating it, let alone what I’d do if it broke down. It just fades into the background as I hurtle toward my destination.

By contrast, my campervan has some of the qualities of a focal thing. For one thing, the fact that it’s old and relatively rudimentary means that some of its inner workings are within my ability to maintain and repair. More than that, though, it’s not built for speed, but for staying in with family or friends, and this means that it doesn’t work brilliantly as a mode of transport alone. As a result, when I’m driving it my attention is brought back to the journey, to the road and the landscape moving past at an easy pace. The campervan encourages a more appreciative and ‘Zen’ approach to road travel, where the experience of the journey is foregrounded rather than relegated through fixation on the destination.

If it’s true, then, that different technologies can make us different people – or at least, bring out different sides of our personalities – this means that it’s incumbent on us to think about how we incorporate those technologies into our lives. How are the technologies we engage with changing us – for better, or for worse? Are we making room for focal things in a world full of devices? How consistently can we do this, when modern Western life is to such a great extent oriented around the use of devices?

It strikes me that even just a handful of focal things are enough to provide a counterweight against the cumulative effect of devices. Before buying my campervan I was dimly aware that I was becoming an impatient and sometimes even an inconsiderate driver, but I had no clear sense of how much. Yet after only a few days of driving a very different vehicle, I was able to see my own behaviour with distance and clarity. 

As someone who uses a car most days, this is no small observation to have gained about myself, not to mention that I’m paying attention to the experience of the world going past for the first time in years.   

Perhaps, then, the value of focal things shines forth more brightly when set against devices – and this means that technology can, at least some of the time, make our lives not only more efficient but perhaps richer too.