*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.
In his landmark work, Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford examines the history of technology and its influence on societies since the beginning of human civilization. Mumford looks at how technological advances have shaped the modern world, from agriculture to industry to the digital age. He argues that we should use technology in a way that respects humanity’s need for both physical and spiritual well-being. This book provides an insightful overview of our relationship with technology throughout history.
Mumford begins by exploring how early civilizations used primitive tools to make their lives easier. He notes that these tools were often as much about artistry as they were about practicality—they were designed with aesthetics in mind, and were intended to be beautiful as well as functional. This combination of utility and beauty is something that has been lost in modern technology, according to Mumford; today’s machines are often utilitarian but rarely beautiful.
Mumford then examines how the Industrial Revolution changed society—for better or worse—by introducing machines into everyday life. He describes how this new technology was used to perform tasks more quickly and efficiently than before, but also suggests that it had a detrimental effect on humanity’s sense of purpose and connection with nature. He argues that this loss of meaning gave rise to alienation from nature and other people, which can lead to feelings of isolation and unhappiness.
Mumford goes on to discuss how the digital age has furthered this disconnection between humans and their environment, creating an ever-increasing reliance on machines for basic tasks like communication and entertainment. He makes an impassioned plea for us all to remember our roots, noting that our dependence on technology should not come at the expense of our own humanity or our relationship with nature.
In his book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford takes a comprehensive look at the evolution of human-made technologies throughout history, examining both its positive impacts on society as well as its potential dangers if left unchecked. Through his writing, he encourages readers to consider their own relationship with technology and reminds us all that technology should be used responsibly so as not to damage our connection with ourselves or with nature. It is an important read for anyone interested in understanding how we got here—and where we might be headed next.
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. And when nature abetted them they often remained in the idyllic state of the polynesians or the homeric Greeks, giving to art, ritual, and sex the best of their energies.
The pull, as Somebart amply demonstrated in his little study of Luxus and Kapitalismus, came mainly from the court and the courtesan: they directed the energies of society towards an ever moving horizon of consumption. 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