Technics And Civilization – A Review (Part Two)

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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In this part two of the review we continue to present selections from Technics and Civilization covering the Neotechnic Phase which is the third and final stage of the development of technic as explained by Lewis Mumford. To read Part One use the Link: https://dominionreview.ca/technics-and-civilization-a-review-part-one/

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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 paleotechnic 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.” (Source: Ibid. p. 172)

“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.” (Source: Ibid. p. 173)

“With the sudden increase of population that marked the opening years of the paleotechnic period, labor appeared as a new natural resource: a lucky find for the labor-prospector and labor-miner.

Small wonder that the ruling classes flushed with moral indignation when they found that Francis Place and his followers had endeavored to propagate a knowledge of contraceptives among the Manchester operatives in the eighteen-twenties: these philanthropic radicals were threatening an otherwise inexhaustible supply of raw material. And in so far as the workers were diseased, crippled, stupefied, and reduced to apathy and dejection by the paleotechnic environment they were only, up to a certain point, so much the better adapted to the new routine of factory and mill. For the highest standards of factory efficiency were achieved with the aid of only partly used human organisms— in short, of defectives.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 175-176)

“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 organization of the early factories, which threw girls and boys into the same sleeping quarters, also gave power to the overseers of the children which they frequently abused: sadisms and perversions of every kind were common. Home life was crowded out of existence; the very ability to cook disappeared among the women workers.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 179-180)

“To widen the margin between the costs of production and the return from sales in a competitive market, the manufacturer depressed wages, lengthened hours, speeded up motions, shortened the worker’s period of rest, deprived him of recreation and education, robbed him in youth of the opportunities for growth, in maturity of the benefits of family life, and in old age of his security and peace.

So unscrupulous was the competition that in the early part of the period, the manufacturers even defrauded their own class: the mines that used Watt’s steam engine refused to pay him the royalties they owed, and Shuttle Clubs were formed by the manufacturers to assist members sued by Kay for royalties on his invention.

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.” (Source: Ibid. p. 186)

Power And Time

“During the paleotechnic period the changes that were manifested in every department of technics rested for the most part on one central fact: the increase of energy. Size, speed, quantity, the multiplication of machines, were all reflections of the new means of utilizing fuel and the enlargement of the available stock of fuel itself.

Power was at last dissociated from its natural human and geographic limitations: from the caprices of the weather, from the irregularities of the rainfall and wind, from the energy intake in the form of food which definitely restricts the output of men and animals.” (Source: Ibid. p. 196)

“With the enormous increase in power a new tempo had entered production: the regimentation of time, which had been sporadic and fitful now began to influence the entire Western World. The symptom of this change was the mass production of cheap watches: first begun in Switzerland, and then undertaken on a large scale in Waterbury, Connecticut, in the eighteen-fifties.

Time-saving now became an important part of labor-saving. And as time was accumulated and put by, it was reinvested, like money capital, in new forms of exploitation. From now on filling time and killing time became important considerations: the early paleotechnic employers even stole time from their workers by blowing the factory whistle a quarter of an hour earlier in the morning, or by moving the hands of the clock around more swiftly during the lunch period.” (Source: Ibid. p. 197)

 “One need not wonder that those who affect to control the destinies of industrial society, the bankers, the business men, and the politicians, have steadily put the brakes upon the transition and have sought to limit the neotechnic developments and avoid the drastic changes that must be effected throughout the entire social milieu.” (Source: Ibid. p. 267)

Summary Of Social Reactions

“Each of the three phases of machine civilization has left its deposits in society. Each has changed the landscape, altered the physical layout of cities, used certain resources and spumed others, favored certain types of commodity and certain paths of activity, and modified the common technical heritage. It is the sum total of these phases, confused, jumbled, contradictory, cancelling out as well as adding to their forces that constitutes our present mechanical civilization.

Some aspects of this civilization are in complete decay; some are alive but neglected in thought; still others are at the earliest stages of development. To call this complicated inheritance the Power Age or the Machine Age is to conceal more facts about it than one reveals. If the machine appears to dominate life today, it is only because society is even more disrupted than it was in the seventeenth century.” (Source: Ibid. p. 268)

The Mechanical Routine

“The first characteristic of modern machine civilization is its temporal regularity. From the moment of waking, the rhythm of the day is punctuated by the clock. Irrespective of strain or fatigue, despite reluctance or apathy, the household rises close to its set hour. Tardiness in rising is penalized by extra haste in eating breakfast or in walking to catch the train: in the long run, it may even mean the loss of a job or of advancement in business.” (Source: Ibid. p. 269)

“Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own. The school teacher, the lawyer, even the doctor with his schedule of operations conform their functions to a time-table almost as rigorous as that of the locomotive engineer.” (Source: Ibid. p. 270)

“Hence the existence of a machine civilization, completely timed and scheduled and regulated, does not necessarily guarantee maximum efficiency in any sense. Time-keeping establishes a useful point of reference, and is invaluable for co-ordinating diverse groups and functions which lack any other common frame of activity. In the practice of an individual’s vocation such regularity may greatly assist concentration and economize effort. But to make it arbitrarily rule over human functions is to reduce existence itself to mere timeserving and to spread the shades of the prison-house over too large an area of human conduct. The regularity that produces apathy and atrophy—that acedia which was the bane of monastic existence, as it is likewise of the army—is as wasteful as the irregularity that produces disorder and confusion.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 270-271)

Purposeless Materialism: Superfluous Power

“Growing out of its preoccupation with quantity production is the machine’s tendency to center effort exclusively upon the production of material goods. There is a disproportionate emphasis on the physical means of living: people sacrifice time and present enjoyments in order that they acquire a greater abundance of physical means; for there is supposed to be a close relation between well-being and the number of bathtubs, motor cars, and similar machine-made products that one may possess. This tendency, not to satisfy the physical needs of life, but to expand toward an indefinite limit the amount of physical equipment that is applied to living is not exclusively characteristic of the machine, because it has existed as a natural accompaniment of other phases of capitalism in other civilizations.

What is typical of the machine is the fact that these ideals, instead of being confined to a class, have been vulgarized and spread—at least as an ideal—in every section of society.” (Source: Ibid. p. 273)

“From the social standpoint, one final characterization of the machine, perhaps the most important of all, must be noted: the machine imposes the necessity for collective effort and widens its range. To the extent that men have escaped the control of nature they must submit to the control of society. As in a serial operation every part must function smoothly and be geared to the right speed in order to ensure the effective working of the process as a whole, so in society at large there must be a close articulation between all its elements.” (Source: Ibid. p. 280)

“The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical power, the multiplication of goods, the contraction of time and space, the standardization of performance and product, the transfer of skill to automata, and the increase of collective interdependence—these, then, are the chief characteristics of our machine civilization. They are the basis of the particular forms of life and modes of expression that distinguish Western Civilization, at least in degree, from the various earlier civilizations that preceded it.” (Source: Ibid. p. 281)

 “In the translation of technical improvements into social processes, however, the machine has undergone a perversion: instead of being utilized as an instrument of life, it has tended to become an absolute. Power and social control, once exercised chiefly by military groups who had conquered and seized the land, have gone since the seventeenth century to those who have organized and controlled and owned the machine. The machine has been valued because—it increased the employment of machines. And such employment was the source of profits, power, and wealth to the new ruling classes, benefits which had hitherto gone to traders or to those who monopolized the land; Jungles and tropical islands were invaded during the nineteenth century for the purpose of making new converts to the machine.” (Source: Ibid. p. 281)

“Resistance to mechanical improvements took a wide variety of forms. The most direct and simple form was to smash the offending machine itself or to murder its inventor.

. . . . the direct war against the machine was an unevenly matched struggle; for the financial and military powers were on the side of the classes that were bent on exploiting the machine, and in a pinch the soldiery, armed with their new machines, could demolish the resistance of the handworkers with a volley of musketry.” (Source: Ibid. p. 284)

“As soon as the machine came to predominate in actual life, the only place where it could be successfully attacked or resisted was in the attitudes and interests of those who worked it. The extent to which unmechanical ideologies and programs have flourished since the seventeenth century, despite the persistent habituation of the machine, is in part a measure of the amount of resistance that the machine has, directly or indirectly, occasioned.” (Source: Ibid. p. 285)

“Not until the new lands were completely occupied and exploited did the machine come in, to claim its special form of dominion over those who had shown neither courage nor luck nor cunning in exploiting Nature. For millions of men and women, the new lands staved off the moment of submission. By accepting the shackles of nature they could evade for a brief while the complicated interdependence of the machine civilization. The more humane or fanatic types, in the company of their fellows, could even make an equally brief effort to realize their dream of the perfect society or the Heavenly City: from the Shaker colonies in New England to the Mormons of Utah there stretched a weak faint line of perfectionists, seeking to circumvent both the aimless brutality of nature and the more purposeful brutality of man.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 296-297)

“Within a short century this savage idyll practically came to an end. The industrial pioneer caught up with the land pioneer and the latter could only rehearse in play what his forefathers had done out of sheer necessity. But as long as the opportunities were open in the unsettled countries, people took advantage of them in numbers that would be astounding if the blessings of an orderly, acquisitive, mechanized civilization were as great as the advocates of Progress believed and preached.

Millions of people chose a lifetime of danger, heroic toil, deprivation and hardships, battling with the forces of Nature, rather than accept life on the terms that it was offered alike to the victorious and the vanquished in the new hives of industry.

The movement was in part the reverse of that great organizing effort of the eleventh and twelfth centuries which cleared the forests and marshes and erected cities from one end of Europe to the other: it was rather a tendency to disperse, to escape from a close, systematic, cultivated life into an open and relatively barbarous existence.” (Source: Ibid. p. 298)

“. . . . war is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society; and it has an element of advantage that puts it high above all the other preparatory forms of mass-sport in which the attitudes of war are mimicked: war is real, while in all the other mass-sports there is an element of make-believe: apart from the excitements of the game and the gains or losses from gambling, it does not really matter who is victorious. In war, there is no doubt as to the reality: success may bring the reward of death just as surely as failure, and it may bring it to the remotest spectator as well as to the gladiators in the center of the vast arena of the nations.” (Source: Ibid. p. 309)

“. . . . war breaks the tedium of a mechanized society and relieves it from the pettiness and prudence of its daily efforts, by concentrating to their last degree both the mechanization of the means of production and the countering vigor of desperate vital outbursts. War sanctions the utmost exhibition of the primitive at the same time that it deifies the mechanical. In modern war, the raw primitive and the clockwork mechanical are one.

In view of its end products—the dead, the crippled, the insane, the devastated regions, the shattered resources, the moral corruption, the anti-social hates and hoodlumisms—war is the most disastrous outlet for the repressed impulses of society that has been devised. The evil consequences have increased in magnitude and in human distress in proportion as the actual elements of fighting have become more mechanized: the threat of chemical warfare against the civilian population as well as the military arm places in the hands of the armies of the world instruments of ruthlessness of which only the most savage conquerors in the past would have taken advantage.” (Source: Ibid. p. 310)

New Cultural Values

“Because of their independent source of power, and their semiautomatic operation even in their cruder forms, machines have seemed to have a reality and an independent existence apart from the user. Whereas the educational values of handicraft were mainly in the process, those of the machine were largely in the preparatory design: hence the process itself was understood only by the machinists and technicians responsible for the design and operation of the actual machinery. As production became more mechanized and the discipline of the factory became more impersonal and the work itself became less rewarding.” (Source: Ibid. p. 322)

“While many of the boasted achievements of industrialism are merely rubbish, and while many of the goods produced by the machine are fraudulent and evanescent, its esthetic, its logic, and its factual technique remain a durable contribution: they are among man s supreme conquests. The practical results may be admirable or dubious: but the method that underlies them has a permanent importance to the race, apart from its immediate consequences.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 324-325)

The Neutrality Of Order

“Before the machine pervaded life, order was the boast of the gods and absolute monarchs. Both the deity and his representatives on earth had, however, the misfortune to be inscrutable in their judgment and frequently capricious and cruel in their assertion of mastery. On the human level, their order was represented by slavery: complete determination from above: complete subservience without question or understanding below.

With the development of the sciences and with the articulation of the machine in practical life, the realm of order was transferred from the absolute rulers, exercising a personal control, to the universe of impersonal nature and to the particular group of artifacts and customs we call the machine.” (Source: Ibid. p. 326)

The Dissolution of “The Machine”

“What we call, in its final results, ‘the machine’ was not, we have seen, the passive by-product of technics itself, developing through small ingenuities and improvements and finally spreading over the entire field of social effort. On the contrary, the mechanical discipline and many of the primary inventions themselves were the result of deliberate effort to achieve a mechanical way of life: the motive in back of this was not technical efficiency but holiness, or power over other men. In the course of development machines have extended these aims and provided a physical vehicle for their fulfillment.” (Source: Ibid. p. 364)

“If one begins with production as an end in itself there is nothing within the machine system or the price system to guarantee a sufficient supply of vital goods. The capitalist economy attempted to avoid the necessity for erecting a real standard of life by relying upon the automatic operation of men’s private interests, under the spell of the profit motive. All the necessary gains in production, along with a cheapening of the objects sold, were supposed to be an inevitable by-product of the business of buying cheap and selling where the demand was strongest and the supply scantest. The enlightened self-interest of individual buyers was the guarantee that the right things would be produced, in the right order, at the right time.

Lacking any standard for distributing income except on the basis of the gross labor performed and on the bare subsistence necessary to enable the worker to return each day to his job, this system never succeeded in its best days even on its own terms. The history of capitalism is the history of quantity production, over-expansion, greedy private over-capitalization on the basis of an increasing prospective income, the private appropriation of profits and dividends at the expense of the workers and the vast body of noncapitalist ultimate consumers—all followed, again and again, by a glut of unbought goods, a breakdown, bankruptcy, deflation, and the bitter starvation and depression of the working classes whose original inability to buy back the goods they had produced was always the major factor in this debacle.” (Source: Ibid. pp.400-401)

“Our mechanical civilization, contrary to the assumption of those who worship its external power the better to conceal their own feeling of impotence, is not an absolute. All its mechanisms are dependent upon human aims and desires: many of them flourish in direct proportion to our failure to achieve rational social cooperation and integrated personalities. Hence we do not have to renounce the machine completely and go back to handicraft in order to abolish a good deal of useless machinery and burdensome routine: we merely have to use imagination and intelligence and social discipline in our traffic with the machine itself.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 426-427)

Toward A Dynamic Equilibrium

“The chief justification of the gigantic changes that took place during the nineteenth century was the fact of change itself. No matter what happened to human lives and social relations, people looked upon each new invention as a happy step forward toward further inventions, and society went on blindly like a caterpillar tractor, laying down its new road in the very act of lifting up the old one. The machine was supposed to abolish the limits of movement and of growth: machines were to become bigger: engines were to become more powerful: speeds were to become faster: mass production was to multiply more vastly: the population itself was to keep on increasing indefinitely until it finally outran the food supply or exhausted the soil of nitrogen. So went the nineteenth century myth.” (Source: Ibid. p. 429)

“Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century. Limits in thought and action, norms of growth and development, are now as present in our consciousness as they were absent to the contemporaries of Herbert Spencer. In our technics, countless improvements of course remain to be made, and there are doubtless numerous fresh fields still to be opened: but even in the realm of pure mechanical achievement we are already within sight of natural limits, not imposed by human timidity or lack of resources or immature technics, but by the very nature of the elements with which we work. The period of exploration and unsystematic, sporadic advance, which seemed to the nineteenth century to embody the essential characteristics of the new economy, is rapidly coming to an end.” (Source: Ibid. p. 429)

“Once we have generally reached a new technical plateau we may remain on that level with very minor ups and down for thousands of years. What are the implications of this approaching equilibrium?

First: equilibrium in the environment. This means first the restoration of the balance between man and nature. The conservation and restoration of soils, the re-growth wherever this is expedient and possible, of the forest cover to provide shelter for wild life and to maintain man’s primitive background as a source of recreation, whose importance increases in proportion to the refinement of his cultural heritage.

Second: equilibrium in industry and agriculture. This has rapidly been taking place during the last two generations in the migration of modem technics from England to America and to the rest of Europe, and from all these countries in turn to Africa and Asia.

Third: equilibrium in population. There are parts of the World in which there is a practical balance between births and deaths: most of these countries, France, Great Britain, the United States, the Scandinavian countries, are in a relatively high state of technical and cultural development.” (Source: Ibid. p. 430)

Summary And Prospect

“We have studied the origins, the advances, the triumphs, the lapses, and the further promises of modern technics. We have observed the limitations the Western European imposed upon himself in order to create the machine and project it as a body outside his personal will: we have noted the limitations that the machine has imposed upon men through the historic accidents that accompanied its development.

We have seen the machine arise out of the denial of the organic and the living, and we have in turn marked the reaction of the organic and the living upon the machine. This reaction has two forms. One of them, the use of mechanical means to return to the primitive, means a throwback to lower levels of thought and emotion which will ultimately lead to the destruction of the machine itself and the higher types of life that have gone into its conception. The other involves the rebuilding of the individual personality and the collective group, and the re-orientation of all forms of thought and social activity toward life: this second reaction promises to transform the nature and function of our mechanical environment and to lay wider and firmer and safer foundations for human society at large. The issue is not decided: the results are not certain: and where in the present chapter I have used the prophetic form I have not been blind to the fact that while all the tendencies and movements I have pointed to are real, they are still far from being supreme: so when I have said ‘it will’ I have meant ‘we must.'” (Source: Ibid. pp. 433-434)

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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

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