Technics And Civilization – A Review (Part One)

Technics and Civilization

A Review by Alan Danesh – Part One

TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

By Lewis Mumford

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD

London

“Published in 1934, Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization remains a foundational masterpiece in science and technology studies, offering a sweeping historical narrative and an urgent polemic against technological determinism. Writing well before the dawn of the internet, personal computers, or television, Mumford delivers a profound revelation: the true catalyst of the modern machine age was not the Industrial Revolution’s steam engine, but rather the moral, social, and spiritual shifts of the Middle Ages.

 Mumford’s central argument is that the machine did not suddenly drop from the sky to reshape humanity; rather, human culture prepared itself for the machine. He famously argues that the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.

In the monastery, the desire for a strict ‘will to order,’ regular routines, and synchronized time-discipline laid the psychological groundwork for capitalism and industrialization. He tracks this transformation across three distinct historical waves:

·         The Eotechnic Phase (10th–18th Century): A water-and-wood-based economy that worked in relative harmony with nature.

·         The Paleotechnic Phase (18th–19th Century): The dark era of coal, iron, and unbridled pollution that treated human beings as mere cogs in a larger apparatus.

·         The Neotechnic Phase (20th Century onward): An era powered by electricity and lighter alloys where technology has the potential to become ‘life-sensitive,’ organic, and tailored back to human scales.” (Source: AI overview, online public domain)

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The following are selections from Technics and Civilization seamlesslycovering the first two stages of the development of the machine as explained by Mumford. Part two of the review will cover the third and final stage of the development of the machine.

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“During the last thousand years the material basis and the cultural forms of Western Civilization have been profoundly modified by the development of the machine. How did this come about? Where did it take place? What were the chief motives that encouraged this radical transformation of the environment and the routine of life: what were the ends in view: what were the means and methods: what unexpected values have arisen in the process? These are some of the questions that the present study seeks to answer.” (Source: Technics and Civilization, p. 3)

“To understand the dominating role played by technics in modern civilization, one must explore in detail the preliminary period of ideological and social preparation. Not merely must one explain the existence of the new mechanical instruments: one must explain the culture that was ready to use them and profit by them so extensively. For note this: mechanization and regimentation are not new phenomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in organized forms which dominate every aspect of our existence.” (Source: Ibid. p. 4)

“Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men’s minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox.” (Source: Ibid. p. 14)

“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. Here, at the very beginning of modern technics appeared prophetically the accurate automatic machine which, only after centuries of further effort, was also to prove the final consummation of this technics in every department of industrial activity.” (Source: Ibid. p. 14)

“Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it.”(Source: Ibid. p. 17)

“The gain in mechanical efficiency through co-ordination and through the closer articulation of the day’s events cannot be overestimated: while this increase cannot be measured in mere horsepower, one has only to imagine its absence today to foresee the speedy disruption and eventual collapse of our entire society. The modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam easier than it could do without the clock.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 17-18)

The influence of capitalism

“The development of capitalism brought the new habits of abstraction and calculation into the lives of city people: only the country folk, still existing on their more primitive local basis, were partly immune. Capitalism turned people from tangibles to intangibles; its symbol, as Sombart observes, is the account book: ‘its life-value lies in its profit and loss account.’ The ‘economy of acquisition,’ which had hitherto been practiced by rare and fabulous creatures like Midas and Croesus, became once more the everyday mode: it tended to replace the direct ‘economy of needs’ and to substitute money-values for life-values. The whole process of business took on more and more an abstract form; it was concerned with non-commodities, imaginary futures, hypothetical gains.” (Source: Ibid. p. 23)

“Thus, although capitalism and technics must be clearly distinguished at every stage, one conditioned the other and reacted upon it. The merchant accumulated capital by widening the scale of his operations, quickening his turnover, and discovering new territories for exploitation: the inventor carried on a parallel process by exploiting new methods of production and devising new things to be produced.

Sometimes trade appeared as a rival to the machine by offering greater opportunities for profit: sometimes it curbed further developments in order to increase the profit of a particular monopoly: both motives are still operative in capitalist society.” (Source: Ibid. p. 26)

“Whether machines would have been invented so rapidly and pushed so zealously without the extra incentive of commercial profit is extremely doubtful: for all the more skilled handicraft occupations were deeply entrenched, and the introduction of printing for ex- ample, was delayed as much as twenty years in Paris by the bitter opposition of the guild of scribes and copyists. But while technics undoubtedly owes an honest debt to capitalism, as it does likewise to war. It was nevertheless unfortunate that the machine was conditioned, at the outset, by these foreign institutions and took on characteristics that had nothing essentially to do with the technical processes or the forms of work. Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to increase private profit: mechanical instruments were used for the aggrandizement of the ruling classes. It was because of capitalism that the handicraft industries in both Europe and other parts of the world were recklessly destroyed by machine products, even when the latter were inferior to the thing they replaced: for the prestige of improvement and success and power was with the machine, even when it improved nothing, even when technically speaking it was a failure.” (Source: Ibid. pp.26-27)

“By supporting the machine, capitalism quickened its pace, and gave a special incentive to preoccupation with mechanical improvements: though it often failed to reward the inventor, it succeeded by blandishments and promises in stimulating him to further effort. In many departments the pace was over-accelerated, and the stimulus was over-applied: indeed, the necessity to promote continual changes and improvements, which has been characteristic of capitalism, introduced an element of instability into technics and kept society from assimilating its mechanical improvements and integrating them in an appropriate social pattern. As capitalism itself has developed and expanded, these vices have in fact grown more enormous, and the dangers to society as a whole have likewise grown proportionately.” (Source: Ibid. p. 27)

Social regimentation

“If mechanical thinking and ingenious experiment produced the machine, regimentation gave it a soil to grow in: the social process worked hand in hand with the new ideology and the new technics.

Long before the peoples of the Western World turned to the machine, mechanism as an element in social life had come into existence.

Before inventors created engines to take the place of men, the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones for the pyramids, pulling in rhythm to the crack of the whip, the slaves working in the Roman galley, each man chained to his seat and unable to perform any other motion than the limited mechanical one, the order and march and system of attack of the Macedonian phalanx—these were all machine phenomena. Whatever limits the actions and movements of human beings to their bare mechanical elements belongs to the physiology, if not to the mechanics, of the machine age.” (Source: Ibid. p. 41)

“Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class sobriety and gave them God’s sanction. True: the main devices of finance were a product of Catholic Europe, and Protestantism has received undeserved praise as a liberating force from medieval routine and undeserved censure as the original source and spiritual justification of modern capitalism. But the peculiar office of Protestantism was to unite finance to the concept of a godly life and to turn the asceticism countenanced by religion into a device for concentration upon worldly goods and worldly advancement. Protestantism rested firmly on the abstractions of print and money. . . . .  . The expression of collective beliefs through the arts was a snare: so the Protestant stripped the images from his Cathedral and left the bare stones of engineering: he distrusted all painting, except perhaps portrait painting, which mirrored his righteousness; and he looked upon the theater and the dance as a lewdness of the devil. Life, in all its sensuous variety and warm delight, was drained out of the Protestant’s world of thought: the organic disappeared.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 42-43)

“From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth men lived in an empty world: a world that was daily growing emptier. They said their prayers, they repeated their formulas; they even sought to retrieve the holiness they had lost by resurrecting superstitions they had long abandoned: hence the fierceness and hollow fanaticism of the Counter-Reformation, its burning of heretics, its persecution of witches, precisely in the midst of the growing ‘enlightenment.’” (Source: Ibid. pp. 44-45)

The mechanical universe

“The issues of practical life found their justification and their appropriate frame of ideas in the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century: this philosophy has remained, in effect, the working creed of technics, even though its ideology has been challenged, modified, amplified, and in part undermined by the further pursuit of science itself. A series of thinkers: Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Pascal, defined the province of science, elaborated its special technique of research, and demonstrated its efficacy.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 45-46)

“By confining his operations to those aspects of reality which had, so to say, market value, and by isolating and dismembering the corpus of experience, the physical scientist created a habit of mind favorable to discrete practical inventions: at the same time it was highly unfavorable to all those forms of art for which the secondary qualities and the individualized receptors and motivators of the artist were of fundamental importance. By his consistent metaphysical principles and his factual method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upon real experience: he substituted for the body and blood of reality a skeleton of effective abstractions which he could manipulate with appropriate wires and pulleys.

What was left was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a wasteland. In order to thrive at all, it was necessary for the inheritors of the seventeenth century idolum to fill the world up again with new organisms, devised to represent the new realities of physical science. Machines—and machines alone—completely met the requirements of the new scientific method and point of view: they fulfilled the definition of ‘reality’ far more perfectly than living organisms.” (Source: Ibid. p. 51)

The duty to invent

“The point is that invention had become a duty, and the desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child’s delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by critical discernment: people agreed that inventions were good, whether or not they actually provided benefits, just as they agreed that child-bearing was good, whether the offspring proved a blessing to society or a nuisance.” (Source: Ibid. p. 53)

“As everyone recognizes a thousand salutary instruments came out of the new technics; but in origin from the seventeenth century on the machine served as a substitute religion, and a vital religion does not need the justification of mere utility.

The religion of the machine needed such support as little as the transcendental faiths it supplanted: for the mission of religion is to provide an ultimate significance and motive-force: the necessity of invention was a dogma, and the ritual of a mechanical routine was the binding element in the faith. In the eighteenth century, Mechanical Societies sprang into existence, to propagate the creed with greater zeal: they preached the gospel of work, justification by faith in mechanical science, and salvation by the machine. Without the missionary enthusiasm of the enterprisers and industrialists and engineers and even the untutored mechanics from the eighteenth century onward, it would be impossible to explain the rush of converts and the accelerated tempo of mechanical improvement. The impersonal procedure of science, the hard-headed contrivances of mechanics, the rational calculus of the utilitarians—these interests captured emotion, all the more because the golden paradise of financial success lay beyond.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 53-54)

“The regimentation of modern warfare carries much farther than the actual discipline of the army itself. From rank to rank passes the word of command: that passage would he impeded if, instead of mechanical obedience, it met with a more active and participating form of adjustment, involving knowledge of how’ and why and wherefore and for whom and to what end: the commanders of the sixteenth century discovered that effectiveness in mass-fighting increased in proportion as the individual soldier was reduced to a power-unit and trained to be an automaton. The weapon, even when it is not used to inflict death, is nevertheless a means for enforcing a pattern of human behavior which would not be accepted unless the alternative w-ere physical mutilation or death: it is, in short, a means of creating a dehumanized response in the enemy or the victim.” (Source: Ibid. p. 84)

“The general indoctrination of soldierly habits of thought in the seventeenth century was, it seems probable, a great psychological aid to the spread of machine industrialism. In terms of the barracks, the routine of the factory seemed tolerable and natural. The spread of conscription and volunteer militia forces throughout the Western World after the French Revolution made army and factory, so far as their social effects went, almost interchangeable terms.” (Source: Ibid. p. 84)

“The effect of firearms upon technics was three-fold. To begin with, they necessitated the large scale use of iron, both for the guns themselves and for cannon-balls. While the development of armor called forth the skill of the smith, the multiplication of cannon demanded cooperative manufacture on a much larger scale: the old fashioned methods of handicraft were no longer adequate. Because of the destructions of the forest, experiments were made in the use of coal in the iron furnaces, from the seventeenth century onwards, and when, a century later, the problem was finally solved by Abraham Darby in England, coal became a key to military as well as to the new industrial power.” (Source: Ibid. p. 87)

“The alliance of mechanization and militarization was, in sum, an unfortunate one: for it tended to restrict the actions of social groups to a military pattern, and it encouraged the rough-and-ready tactics of the militarist in industry. It was unfortunate for society at large that a power-organization like the army, rather than the more humane and cooperative craft guild, presided over the birth of the modern forms of the machine.” (Source: Ibid. p. 96)

Mars and Venus

“If mechanical production was heightened and shaped by the active demands of the battlefield and the parade-ground, it was also possibly influenced by the indirect effects of war during the specious intervals of repose.

War is the chief instrument by means of which the ruling classes create the state and fix their hold upon the state. These ruling classes, whatever their military animus and origin, alternate their outbursts of prowess with periods devoted to what Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class called the ritual of conspicuous waste.” (Source: Ibid. p. 96)

“From the seventeenth century on, the machine was conditioned by the disordered social life of Western Europe. The machine gave an appearance of order to that chaos: it promised fulfillment for that emptiness: but all its promises were insidiously undermined by the very forces that gave it shape—the gambling of the miner, the power-lust of the soldier, abstract pecuniary ends of the financier, and the luxurious extensions of sexual power and surrogates for sex contrived by the court and the courtesan. All these forces, all these purposes and goals, are still visible in our machine-culture; by imitation they have spread from class to class and from town to country.” (Source: Ibid. p. 106)

New sources of power

“At the bottom of the eotechnic economy stands one important fact: the diminished use of human beings as prime movers, and the separation of the production of energy from its application and immediate control. While the tool still dominated production energy and human skill were united within the craftsman himself: with the separation of these two elements the productive process itself tended toward a greater impersonality, and the machine-tool and the machine developed along with the new engines of power. If power machinery be a criterion, the modern industrial revolution began in the twelfth century and was in full swing by the fifteenth.” (Source: Ibid. p. 112)

“Wages, never far above the level of subsistence, were driven down in the new industries by the competition of the machine. So low were they in the early part of the nineteenth century that in the textile trades they even for a while retarded the introduction of the power loom. As if the surplus of workers, ensured by the disfranchisement and pauperization of the agricultural workers, were not enough to re-enforce the Iron Law of Wages, there was an extraordinary rise in the birth-rate. The causes of this initial rise are still obscure; no present theory fully accounts for it. But one of the tangible motives was the fact that unemployed parents were forced to live upon the wages of the young they had begotten. From the chains of poverty and perpetual destitution there was no escape for the new mine worker or factory worker: the servility of the mine, deeply engrained in that occupation, spread to all the accessory employments. It needed both luck and cunning to escape those shackles.” (Source: Ibid. p. 154)

“Here was something almost without parallel in the history of civilization: not a lapse into barbarism through the enfeeblement of a higher civilization, but an upthrust into barbarism, aided by the very forces and interests which originally had been directed toward the conquest of the environment and the perfection of human culture.

Where and under what conditions did this change take place? And how, when it represented in fact the lowest point in social development Europe had known since the Dark Ages did it come to be looked upon as a humane and beneficial advance? We must answer those questions.” (Source: Ibid. p. 154)

Carboniferous capitalism

“The great shift in population and industry that took place in the eighteenth century was due to the introduction of coal as a source of mechanical power, to the use of new means of making that power effective—the steam engine—and to new methods of smelting and working up iron. Out of this coal and iron complex, a new civilization developed.” (Source: Ibid. p. 156)

“If atmospheric sewage was the first mark of paleotechnic industry, stream pollution was the second. The dumping of the industrial and chemical waste-products into the streams was a characteristic mark of the new order. Wherever the factories went, the streams became foul and poisonous: the fish died or were forced…to migrate, and the water became unfit for either drinking or bathing. In many cases the refuse so wantonly disposed of was in fact capable of being used: but the whole method of industry was so short-sighted and so unscientific that the full utilization of by-products did not concern anyone for the first century or so. What the streams could not transport away remained in piles and hillocks on the outskirts of the industrial plant, unless it could be used to fill in the water-courses or the swamps on the new sites of the industrial city.

These forms of industrial pollution of course go back very far in the history of paleotechnic industry.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 169-170)

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Link for downloading a copy of Technics and Civilization for personal reading free of charge: https://dn711003.ca.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.49974/2015.49974.Technics-And-Civilization.pdf