Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford explores the history of technological development. We learn about the reasons for technological proliferation in the West, and the consequences it has had on society.
Highlights
In order to conquer the machine and subdue it to human purposes, one must first understand it and assimilate it. So far, we have embraced the machine without fully understanding it, or, like the weaker romantics, we have rejected the machine without first seeing how much of it we could intelligently assimilate.
The clock.
The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science….time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. P.6 To become “as regular a clockwork” was the bourgeois ideal, and to own a watch was for long a definite symbol of success. The increasing tempo of civilization led to a demand for greater power: and in turn power quickened the tempo. P.16
Spiritual versus material.
During the Middle Ages the external world had had no conceptual hold upon the mind. Natural facts were insignificant compared with the divine order and intention which Christ and his Church had revealed: the visible world was merely a pledge and a symbol of that Eternal World of whose blisses and damnations it gave such a keen foretaste.
People ate and drank and mated, basked in the sun and grew solemn under the stars; but there was little meaning in this immediate state: whatever significance the items of daily life had was as stage accessories and costumes and rehearsals for the drama of Man’s pilgrimage through eternity. P.29
Like the machine, the monastery was incapable of self-perpetuation except by renewal from without. And apart from the fact that women were similarly organized in nunneries, the monastery was like the army, a strictly masculine world. Like the army again, it sharpened and disciplined and focused the masculine will-to-power: a succession of military leaders came from the religious orders, while the leader of the order that exemplified the ideals of the Counter-Reformation began his life as a soldier.
One of the first experimental scientists, Roger Bacon, was a monk; so, again, was Michael Stifel, who in 1544 widened the use of symbols in algebraic equations; the monks stood high in the roll of mechanics and inventors. The spiritual routine of the monastery, if it did not positively favor the machine, at least nullified many of the influences that worked against it. And unlike the similar discipline of the Buddhists, that of the Western monks gave rise to more fertile and complex kinds of machinery than prayer wheels. In still another way did the institutions of the Church perhaps prepare the way for the machine: in their contempt for the body.
Conquering nature.
The Dream of conquering nature is one of the oldest that has flowed and ebbed man’s mind. Each great epoch in human history in which this will has found a positive outlet marks a rise in human culture and the permanent contribution to man security and well-being. Prometheus, the fire bringer, stands at the beginning of man’s conquest: for fire not merely made possible the easier digestion of foods, but its flames kept off predatory animals, and around the warmth of it, during the colder seasons of the year, an active social life became possible, beyond the mere huddle and vacuity of the winter’s sleep.
The slow advances in making tools and weapons and utensils that marked the earlier stone periods were a pedestrian conquest of the environment: gains by inches. In the neolithic period came the first great lift, with the domestication of plants and animals, the making of orderly and effective astronomical observations, and the spread of a relatively peaceful big-stone civilization in many lands separated over the planet. Fire-making, agriculture, pottery, astronomy, were marvellous collective leaps; dominations rather than adaptations. For thousands of years men must have dreamed, vainly, of further short-cuts and controls. P. 37
Seeking an absolute.
To the degree that fear and disruption prevail in society, men tend to seek an absolute: if it does not exist, they project it. Regimentation gave the men of the period a finality they could discover nowhere else. If one of the phenomena of the breakdown of the medieval order was the turbulence that made men freebooters, discoverers, pioneers, breaking away from the tameness of the old ways and the rigor of self-imposed disciplines, the other phenomenon, related to it, but compulsively drawing society into a regimented mould, was the methodical routine of the drill-master and the bookkeeper, the soldier and the bureaucrat. These masters of regimentation gained full ascendancy in the 17th century.
The attitude to money
There is nothing within the machine milieu itself that can explain this fact: for in other cultures production, though it might create vast surpluses for public works and public art, remained a bare necessity of existence, often grudgingly met — not a centre of continuous and overwhelming interest.
In the past, even in Western Europe men had work to obtain the standard of living traditional to their place and class: the notion of acquiring money in order to move out of one’s class was in fact foreign to the earlier feudal and corporate ideology. When their living became easy, people did not go in for abstract acquisition: they worked less.
With the weakening of caste lines and the development of individualism the ritual of conspicuous expenditure spread rapidly throughout the rest of society: it justified the abstractions of the money makers and put to wider use the technical progress of the inventors. The ideal of a powerful expensive life supplanted the ideal of a holy or a humane one. Heaven, which had been deferred to the hereafter in the scheme of the Christian Cosmos, was now to be enjoyed immediately: its streets paved with precious stones, its glittering walls, its marble halls, were almost at hand — provided one had acquired money enough to buy them P.104
Idleness
The new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure — all carefully measured out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy’s father, which coincided, symbolically with the monthly winding of the clock.
Timed payments: timed contracts, timed work: timed meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time became for protestant religious preachers, like Richard Baxter, one of the most heinous sins. To spend time in mere sociability or even in sleep, was reprehensible. P. 42
To escape the lean restrictions of poverty became a sacred duty. Idleness was in itself a sin. A life outside the purlieus of production, without special industrial effort, without money-getting, had ceased to be respectable: the aristocracy itself, moved by its own heightened demands for luxuries and services, compromised with the merchant and manufacturing classes, married into them, adopted their vocations and interests, and welcomed new arrivals to the blessed state of riches. Philosophers speculated, now with faltering attention and a distracted eye, upon the nature of the good and the true and the beautiful.
Happiness
Was there any doubt about it? Their nature was essentially whatever could be embodied in material goods and profitably sold: whatever made life easier, more comfortable, more secure, physically more pleasant: in a word, better upholstered. Finally, the theory of the new age, first formulated in terms of pecuniary success, was expressed in social terms by the utilitarian of the early 19th century.
Happiness was the true end of man, and it consisted in achieving the greatest good for the greatest number. The essence of happiness was to avoid pain and seek pleasure: the quantity of happiness, and ultimately the perfection of human institutions, could be reckoned roughly by the amount of goods a society was capable of producing: expanding wants: expanding markets: expanding enterprises: an expanding body of consumers.
The machine made this possible and guaranteed its success. P.104
To cry enough or to call a limit was treason. Happiness and expanding production were one.
That life may be most intense and significant in its moments of pain and anguish, that it may be most savorless in its moments of repletion, that once the essential means of living are provided its intensities and ecstasies and states of equilibrium cannot be measured mathematically in any relation whatever to the quantity of goods consumed or the quantity of power exercised-in short, the commonplaces of experience to the lover, the adventurer, the parent, the artist, the philosopher, the scientist, the active worker of any sort-these commonplaces were excluded from the popular working creed of utilitarianism..
The Steam Engine
In all its broader aspects, paleotechnic industry rested on the mine: the products of the mine dominated its life and determined its characteristic inventions and improvements. From the mine came the steam pump and presently the steam engine: ultimately the steam locomotive and so, by derivation, the steamboat. From the mine came the escalator, the elevator, which was first utilized elsewhere in the cotton factory, and the subway for urban transportation.
Iron and Blood
Cheap iron and steel made it feasible to equip larger armies and navies than ever before: bigger cannon, bigger warships, more complicated equipment; while the new railroad system made it possible to put more men in the field and to put them in constant communication with the base of supplies at ever greater distances: war became a department of large-scale mass production.
In the very midst of celebrating the triumphs of peace and internationalism in 1851, the paleotechnic regime was preparing for a series of more lethal wars in which, as a result of modern methods of production and transport entire nations would finally become involved: the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, most deadly and vicious of all, the World War.
The Destruction of Environment
The first mark of paleotechnic industry was the pollution of the air. Disregarding Benjamin Franklin’s happy suggestion that coal smoke, being unburnt carbon, should be utilized a second time in the furnace, the new manufacturers erected steam engines and factory chimneys without any effort to conserve energy by burning up thoroughly the products of the first combustion; nor did they at first attempt to utilize the by-products of the coke-ovens or burn up the gases produced in the blast-furnace.
For all its boasts of improvement, the steam engine was only ten per cent efficient: ninety per cent of the heat created escaped in radiation, and a good part of the fuel went up the flue.
Just as the noisy clank of Watt’s original engine was maintained, against his own desire to do away with it, as a pleasing mark of power and efficiency, so the smoking factory chimney, which polluted the air and wasted energy, whose pall of smoke increased the number and quickness of natural fogs and shut off still more sunlight-this emblem of a crude, imperfect technics became the boasted symbol of prosperity.
And here the concentration of paleotechnic industry added to the evils of the process itself. The pollution and dirt of a small iron works situated in the open country could be absorbed or carried away without difficulty.
The Degradation of the Worker
Kant’s doctrine, that every human being should be treated as an end, not as a means, was formulated precisely at the moment when mechanical industry had begun to treat the worker solely as a means -a means to cheaper mechanical production.
Human beings were dealt with in the same spirit of brutality as the landscape: labor was a resource to be exploited, to be mined, to be exhausted, and finally to be discarded. Responsibility for the worker’s life and health ended with the cash-payment for the day’s labor. The poor propagated like flies, reached industrial maturity-ten or twelve years of age-promptly, served their term in the new textile mills or the mines, and died inexpensively.
During the early paleo-technic period their expectation of life was twenty years less than that of the middle classes. For a number of centuries, the degradation of labor had been going on steadily in Europe; at the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to the shrewdness and near-sighted rapacity of the English industrialists, it reached its nadir in England.
In other countries, where the paleotechnic system entered later, the same brutality emerged: the English merely set the pace. What were the causes at work? By the middle of the eighteenth century the handicraft worker had been reduced, in the new industries, into a competitor with the machine.
But there was one weak spot in the system: the nature of human beings themselves: for at first they rebelled at the feverish pace, the rigid discipline, the dismal monotony of their tasks. The main difficulty, as Ure pointed out, did not lie so much in the invention of an effective self-acting mechanism as in the “distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one cooperative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.”
“By the infirmity of human nature,” wrote Ure again, “it happens that the more skillful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and of course the less fit and component of the mechanical system in which … he may do great damage to the whole.” The first requirement for the factory system, then, was the castration of skill. The second was the discipline of starvation. The third was the closing up of alternative occupations by means of land-monopoly and dis-education. In actual operation, these three requirements were met in reverse order.
The Starvation of Life
Religion ceased in large groups to be the opiate of the poor: indeed the mines and the textile mills often lacked even the barest elements of the older Christian culture: and it would be more nearly true to say that opiates became the religion of the poor. Add to the lack of light a lack of color: except for the advertisements on the hoardings, the prevailing tones were dingy ones: in a murky atmosphere even the shadows lose their rich ultramarine or violet colors.
The rhythm of movement disappeared: within the factory the quick staccato of the machine displaced the organic rhythms, measured to song, that characterized the old workshop, as Biicher has pointed out: while the dejected and the outcast shuffled along the streets in Cities of Dreadful Night, and the sharp athletic movements of the sword dances and the morris dances disappeared in the surviving dances of the working classes, who began to imitate clumsily the graceful boredom of the idle and the leisured.
Sex, above all, was starved and degraded in this environment. In the mines and factories an indiscriminate sexual intercourse of the most brutish kind was the only relief from the tedium and drudgery of the day: in some of the English mines the women pulling the carts even worked completely naked-dirty, wild, and degraded as only the worst slaves of antiquity had been. Among the agricultural population in England sexual experience before marriage was a period of experimental grace before settling down: among the new industrial workers, it was often preliminary to abortion, as contemporary evidence proves.
The Doctrine of Progress…
The mechanism that produced the conceit and the self-complacence of the paleotechnic period was in fact beautifully simple. In the eighteenth century the notion of Progress had been elevated into a cardinal doctrine of the educated classes. Man, according to the philosophers and rationalists, was climbing steadily out of the mire of superstition, ignorance, savagery, into a world that was to become ever more polished, humane and rational-the world of the Paris salons before the hailstorm of revolution broke the windowpanes and drove the talkers to the cellar.
Tools and instruments and laws and institutions had all been improved: instead of being moved by instincts and governed by force, men were capable of being moved and governed by reason. Life was judged by the extent to which it ministered to progress, progress was not judged by the extent to which it ministered to life.
The last possibility would have been fatal to admit: it would have transported the problem from the cosmic plane to a human one. What paleotect dared ask himself whether labor-saving, money-grubbing, power-acquiring, space-annihilating, thing-producing devices were in fact producing an equivalent expansion and enrichment of life? That question would have been the ultimate heresy. The men who asked it, the Ruskins, the Nietzsches, the Melvilles, were in fact treated as heretics and cast out of this society: in more than one case, they were condemned to an exacerbating solitude that reached the limit of madness.
The Struggle for Existence
But progress had an economic side: at bottom it was little less than an elaborate rationalizing of the dominant economic conditions. For progress was possible only through increased production: production grew in volume only through larger sales: these in turn were an incentive to mechanical improvements and fresh inventions which ministered to new desires and made people conscious of new necessities.
So the struggle for the market became the dominant motive in a progressive existence. The laborer sold himself to the highest bidder in the labor market. His work was not an exhibition of personal pride and skill but a commodity, whose value varied with the quantity of other laborers who were available for performing the same task. This struggle for the market was finally given a philosophic name: it was called the struggle for existence.
Wage worker competed against wage worker for bare subsistence; the unskilled competed against the skilled; women and children competed against the male heads of families. Along with this horizontal struggle between the different elements in the working class, there was a vertical struggle that rent society in two: the class struggle, the struggle between the possessors and the dispossessed.
These universal struggles served as basis for the new mythology which complemented and extended the more optimistic theory of progress. In his essay on population the Reverend T. R, Malthus shrewdly generalized the actual state of England in the midst of the disorders that attended the new industry. He stated that population tended to expand more rapidly than the food supply, and that it avoided starvation only through a limitation by means of the positive check of continence, or the negative checks of misery, disease, and war. In the course of the struggle for food, the upper classes, with their thrift and foresight and superior mentality emerged from the ruck of mankind.
With this image in mind, and with Malthus’s Essay on Population as the definite stimulus to their thoughts, two British biologists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, projected the intense struggle for the market upon the world of life in general.
Originally published at https://unearnedwisdom.com on January 16, 2022.
