Table of Contents
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 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..
Technological Development
Looking back over the last thousand years, one can divide the development of the machine and the machine civilization into three successive but over-lapping and interpenetrating phases: eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic. The demonstration that industrial civilization was not a single whole, but showed two marked, contrasting phases, was first made by Professor Patrick Geddes and published a generation ago. In defining the paleotechnic and neotechnic phases, he however neglected the important period of preparation, when all the key inventions were either invented or foreshadowed. So, following the archeological parallel he called attention to, I shall call the first period the eotechnic phase: the dawn age of modern technics. While each of these phases roughly represents a period of human history, it is characterized even more significantly by the fact that it forms a technological complex.
Each phase, that is, has its origin in certain definite regions and tends to employ certain special resources and raw materials. Each phase has its specific means of utilizing and generating energy, and its special forms of production. Finally, each phase brings into existence particular types of workers, trains them in particular ways, develops certain aptitudes and discourages others, and draws upon and further develops certain aspects of the social heritage. P.109
The development of glass changed the aspect of indoor life, particularly in regions with long winters and cloudy days. At first it was such a precious commodity that the glass panes were removable and were put in a safe place when the occupants left the house for any time. This high cost restricted glass to public buildings, but step by step it made its way into the private dwelling: Aeneas Sylvius de Piccolomini found in 1448 that half the houses in Wien had glass windows, and toward the end of the sixteenth century glass assumed in the design and construction of the dwelling house a place it had never had in any previous architecture.
More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local. Doing so, it contributed further to the dissociation of medieval society: print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering attention on the printed word, people lost that balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract, which was to be achieved momentarily by the best minds of the fifteenth century—Michelangelo, Leonardo, Alberti—before it passed out, and was replaced by printed letters alone.
To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning and the authority of books was more widely diffused by printing, so that if knowledge had an ampler province so, too, did error. The divorce between print and firsthand experience was so extreme that one of the first great modern educators, John Amos Komensky, advocated the picture book for children as a means of restoring the balance and providing the necessary visual associations.
But the printing press by itself did not perform the revolution: paper played a scarcely less important part: for its uses went far beyond the printed page: The application of power-driven machinery to paper production was one of the important developments of this economy. Paper removed the necessity for face-to-face contact: debts, deeds, contracts, news, were all committed to paper, so that, while feudal society existed by virtue of customs that were rigorously maintained from generation to generation, the last elements of feudal society were abolished in England by the simple device of asking peasants who had always had a customary share in the common lands for some documentary proof that they had ever owned it.
While the textile industries exhibited the steady advance of invention long before the introduction of the steam engine, they likewise witnessed the degradation of labor through the displacement of skill and through the breakdown of political control over the processes of production. The first characteristic is perhaps best seen in the industries where the division of the process could be carried farther than in the textile industries. Manufacture, that is, organized and partitioned handwork carried on in large establishments with or without powermachines, broke down the process of production into a series of specialized operations. Each one of these was carried on by a specialized worker whose facility was increased to the extent that his function was limited. This division was, in fact, a sort of empirical analysis of the working process, analyzing it out into a series of simplified human motions which could then be translated into mechanical operations.
Once this analysis was performed, the rebuilding of the entire sequence of operations into a machine became more feasible. The mechanization of human labor was, in effect, the first step toward the humanization of the machine—humanization in the sense of giving the automaton some of the mechanical equivalents of life-likeness.
The immediate effect of this division of process was a monstrous dehumanization: the worst drudgeries of craftsmanship can hardly be compared to it. Marx has summed up the process admirably. “Whereas,” Marx writes, “simple cooperation leaves the individual’s methods of work substantially unaltered; manufacture revolutionizes these methods and cuts at the root of individual labor power. It transforms the worker into a cripple, a monster, by forcing him to develop some highly specialized dexterity at the cost of a world of productive impulses and faculties—much as in Argentina they slaughter a whole beast simply in order to get his hide or tallow. Not merely are the various partial operations allotted to different individuals; but the individual himself is split up, is transformed into the automatic motor of some partial operation.
This second revolution multiplied, vulgarized, and spread the methods and goods produced by the first: above all, it was directed toward the quantification of life, and its success could be gauged only in terms of the multiplication table. For a whole century the second industrial revolution, which Geddes called the paleotechnic age, has received credit for many of the advances that were made during the centuries that preceded it. In contrast to the supposedly sudden and inexplicable outburst of inventions after 1760 the previous seven hundred years have often been treated as a stagnant period of small-scale petty handicraft production, feeble in power resources and barren of any significant accomplishments. How did this notion become popular?
One reason, I think, is that the critical change that actually did take place during the eighteenth century threw into shadow tlie older technical methods: but perliaps the main reason is that this change took place first and most swiftly in England, and the observations of the new industrial methods, after Adam Smith—who was too early to appraise the transformation—were made by economists who were ignorant of the technical history of Western Europe, or who were inclined to belittle its significance.
The New Barbarism
As we have seen, the earlier technical development had not involved a complete breach with the past. On the contrary, it had seized and appropriated and assimilated the technical innovations of other cultures, some very ancient, and the pattern of industry was wrought into the dominant pattern of life itself. Despite all the diligent mining for gold, silver, lead and tin in the sixteenth century, one could not call the civilization itself a mining civilization; and the handicraftsman’s world did not change completely when he walked from the workshop to the church, or left the garden behind his house to wander out into the open fields beyond the city’s walls. Paleotechnic industry, on the other hand, arose out of the breakdown of European society and carried the process of disruption to a finish.
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 birthrate. 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. 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.
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. Like so many other elements in the new technical world, the use of coal goes back a considerable distance in history.
By the end of the eighteenth century coal began to take the place of current sources of energy as an illuminant through Murdock’s devices for producing illuminating gas. Wood, wind, water, beeswax, tallow, sperm-oil—all these were displaced steadily by coal and derivatives of coal, albeit an efficient type of burner, that produced by Welsbach, did not appear until electricity was ready to supplant gas for illumination. Coal, which could be mined long in advance of use, and which could be stored up, placed industry almost out of reach of seasonal influences and the caprices of the weather. In the economy of the earth, the large-scale opening up of coal seams meant that industry was beginning to live for the first time on an accumulation of potential energy, derived from the ferns of the carboniferous period, instead of upon current income.
The mine is the worst possible local base for a permanent civilization: for when the seams are exhausted, the individual mine must be closed down, leaving behind its debris and its deserted sheds and houses. The byproducts are a befouled and disorderly environment; the end product is an exhausted one. Now, the sudden accession of capital in the form of these vast coal fields put mankind in a fever of exploitation: coal and iron were the pivots upon which the other functions of society revolved.
The reckless, get-rich-quick, devil-take-the-hindmost attitude of the mining rushes spread everywhere: the bonanza farms of the Middle West in the United States were exploited as if they were mines, and the forests were gutted out and mined in the same fashion as the minerals that lay in their hills. Mankind behaved like a drunken heir on a spree. And the damage to form and civilization through the prevalence of these new habits of disorderly exploitation and wasteful expenditure remained, whether or not the source of energy itself disappeared. The psychological results of carboniferous capitalism—the lowered morale, the expectation of getting something for nothing, the disregard for a balanced mode of production and consumption, the habituation to wreckage and debris as part of the normal human environment—all these results were plainly mischievous.
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.
The railroad likewise came directly from the mine: roads with wooden rails were laid down in Newcastle, England, in 1602: but they were common in the German mines a hundred years before, for they enabled the heavy ore carts to be moved easily over the rough and otherwise impassable surface of the mine. Around 1716 these wooden ways were capped with plates of malleable iron; and in 1767 cast iron bars were substituted. (Feldhaus notes that the invention of iron-clad wooden rails is illustrated at tlie time of the Hussite Wars around 1430: possibly the invention of a military engineer.)
The combination of the railroad, the train of cars, and the locomotive, first used in the mines at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was applied to passenger transportation a generation later. Wherever the iron rails and wooden ties of this new system of locomotion went, the mine and the products of the mine went with it: indeed, the principal product carried by railroads is coal. The nineteenth century town became in effect—and indeed in appearance—an extension of the coal mine: The cost of transporting coal naturally increases with distance: hence the heavy industries tended to concentrate near the coal measures. To be cut off from the coal mine was to be cut off from the source of paloetechnic civilization.
The technical history of the next hundred years was directly or indirectly the history of steam. The need for more efficient mining which could reach the deeper seams prompted the effort to devise a more powerful pump than human labor or horse could work, and more regular and more accessible than wind or water mills: this was necessary to clear the galleries of water.
Moved by a desire to earn every possible sum on their investments, the textile manufacturers lengthened the working day: and whereas in England in the fifteenth century it had been fourteen or fifteen hours long in mid-summer with from two and a half to three hours allowed for recreation and meals, in the new milltowns it was frequently sixteen hours long all the year round, with a single hour off for dinner. Operated by the steam engine, lighted by gas, the new mills could work for twenty-four hours. Why not the worker? The steam engine was pacemaker.
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 tlie 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.
Nourished by war, the armament industries, whose plants were over-swollen through railroad building and past wars, sought new markets: in America, they found an outlet in the steel-framed building; but in the long run they were forced back on the more reliable industry of war, and they loyally served their stockholders by inciting competitive fears and rivalries among the nations: the notorious part recently played by the American steel manufacturers in wrecking the International Arms Conference of 1927 was only typical of a thousand less publicized moves during the previous century. Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire paloetechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy of blood and iron.
Its brutal contempt for life was equaled only by the almost priestly ritual it developed in preparation for inflicting death. Its “peace” was indeed the peace that passeth understanding: what was it but latent warfare? What, then, is the nature of this material that exercised such a powerful effect upon the affairs of men? The use of meteoric iron possibly goes back very far in history: there is record of iron derived from the ordinary ores as far back as 1000 B.C., but the rapid oxidation of iron may have wiped out traces of a much earlier utilization. Iron was associated in Egypt with Set, God of the waste and desert, an object of fear; and through iron’s close ties with the military arts this association remains a not inappropriate one. Iron’s principal virtue lies in its combination of great strength and malleability.
Hence the paradox: between 1775 and 1875 there was technological backwardness in the most advanced part of technology. If iron was cheap and if power was plentiful, why should the engineer waste his talents attempting to use less of either? By any paleotechnic standard, there was no answer to this question. Much of the iron that the period boasted was dead weight.
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.
Poverty and land monopoly kept the workers in the locality that needed them and removed the possibility of their improving their position by migration: while exclusion from craft apprenticeship, together with specialization in subdivided and partitioned mechanical functions, unfitted the machine-worker for the career of pioneer or farmer, even though he might have the opportunity to move into the free lands in the newer parts of the world.
Reduced to the function of a cog, the new worker could not operate without being joined to a machine. Since the workers lacked the capitalists’ incentives of gain and social opportunity, the only things that kept them bound to the machine were starvation, ignorance, and fear. These three conditions were the foundations of industrial discipline, and they were retained by the directing classes even though the poverty of the worker undermined and periodically ruined the system of mass production which the new factory discipline promoted.
The esoteric natural philosophy of the seventeenth century had finally become the popular doctrine of the nineteenth.
The gospel of work was the positive side of the incapacity for art, play, amusement, or pure craftsmanship which attended the shriveling up of the cultural and religious values of the past. In the pursuit of gain, the ironmasters and textile masters drove themselves almost as hard as they drove their workers: they scrimped and stinted and starved themselves at the beginning, out of avarice and the will-to-power, as the workers themselves did out of sheer necessity.
The lust for power made the Bounderbys despise a humane life: but they despised it for themselves almost as heartily as they despised it for their wage-slaves. If the laborers were crippled by the doctrine, so were the masters. For a new type of personality had emerged, a walking abstraction: the Economic Man. Living men imitated this penny-in-the-slot automaton, this creature of bare rationalism. These new economic men sacrificed their digestion, the interests of parenthood, their sexual life, their health, most of the normal pleasures and delights of civilized existence to the untrammeled pursuit of power and money.
Nothing retarded them; nothing diverted them . . . except finally the realization that they had more money than they could use, and more power than they could intelligently exercise. Then came belated repentance: Robert Owen founds a Utopian co-operative colony, Nobel, the explosives manufacturer, a peace foundation, Carnegie free libraries. Rockefeller medical institutes. Those whose repentance took a more private form became the victims of their mistresses, their tailors, their art dealers.. Outside the industrial system, the Economic Man was in a state of neurotic maladjustment. These successful neurotics looked upon the arts as unmanly forms of escape from work and business enterprise: but what was their one-sided, maniacal concentration upon work but a much more disastrous escape from life itself? In only the most limited sense were the great industrialists better off than the workers they degraded: jailer and prisoner were both, so to say, inmates of the same House of Terror.
Yet though the actual results of the new industrialism were to increase the burdens of the ordinary worker, the ideology that fostered it was directed toward his release. The central elements in that ideology were two principles that had operated like dynamite upon the solid rock of feudalism and special privilege: the principle of utility and the principle of democracy. Instead of justifying their existence by reason of tradition and custom, the institutions of society were forced to justify themselves by their actual use.
It was in the name of social improvement that many obsolete arrangements that had lingered on from the past were swept away, and it was likewise by reason of their putative utility to mankind at large that the most humane and enlightened minds of the early nineteenth century welcomed machines and sanctioned their introduction. Meanwhile, the eighteenth century had turned the Christian notion of the equality of all men in Heaven into an equality of all men on earth: they were not to achieve it by conversion and death and immortality, but were supposed to be “born free and equal.”
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. Another philosopher of industrialism, just as characteristically a railroad engineer by profession as Spinoza had been a lens grinder, coined a phrase that touched off the whole process: to the struggle for existence and the process of natural selection Spencer appended the results: “the survival of the fittest.”
The phrase itself was a tautology; for survival was taken as the proof of fitness: but that did not decrease its usefulness. This new ideology arose out of the new social order, not out of Darwin’s able biological work. His scientific study of modifications, variations, and the processes of sexual selection were neither furthered nor explained by a theory which accounted not for the occurrence of new organic adaptations, but merely for a possible mechanism whereby certain forms had been weeded out after the survivors had been favorably modified. Moreover, there were the demonstrable facts of commensalism and symbiosis, to say nothing of ecological partnership, of which Darwin himself was fully conscious, to modify the Victorian nightmare of a nature red in tooth and claw. The point is, however, that in paleotechnic society the weaker were indeed driven to the wall and mutual aid had almost disappeared.
The Malthus-Darwin doctrine explained the dominance of the new bourgeoisie, people without taste, imagination, intellect, moral scruples, general culture or even elementary bowels of compassion, who rose to the surface precisely because they fitted an environment that had no place and no use for any of these humane attributes. Only antisocial qualities had survival value. Only people who valued machines more than men were capable under these conditions of governing men to their own profit and advantage.
Class and Nation
The struggle between the possessing classes and the working classes during this period assumed a new form, because the system of production and exchange and the common intellectual milieu had all profoundly altered. This struggle was closely observed and for the first time accurately appraised by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
Just as Darwin had extended the competition of the market to the entire world of life, so did Engels and Marx extend the contemporary class struggle to the entire history of society. But there was a significant difference between the new class struggles and the slave uprisings, the peasant rebellions, the local conflicts between masters and journeymen that had occurred previously in Europe. The new struggle was continuous, the old had been sporadic. Except for the medieval Utopian movements—such as the Lollards— the earlier conflicts had been, in the main, struggles over abuses in a system which both master and worker accepted: the appeal of the worker was to an antecedent right or privilege that had been grossly violated.
The new struggle was over the system itself: it was an attempt on the workers’ part to modify the system of free wage competition and free contract that left the worker, a helpless atom, free to starve or cut his own throat if he did not accept the conditions the industrialists offered. From the standpoint of the paleotechnic worker, the goal of the struggle was control of the labor market: he sought for power as a bargainer, obtaining a slightly larger share of the costs of production, or, if you will, the profits of sale.
But he did not, in general, seek responsible participation as a worker in the business of production: he was not ready to be an autonomous partner in the new collective mechanism, in which the least cog was as important to the process as a whole as the engineers and scientists who had devised it and who controlled it. Here one marks the great gap between handicraft and the early machine economy. Under the first system the worker was on his way to being a journeyman; the journeyman, broadened by travel to other centers, and inducted into the mysteries of his craft, was capable, not merely of bargaining with his employer, but of taking his place.
The class conflict was lessened by the fact that the masters could not take away the workers’ tools of production, which were personal, nor could they decrease his actual pleasure of craftsmanship. Not until specialization and expropriation had given the employer a special advantage did the conflict begin to take on its paleotechnic form. Under the capitalist system the worker could achieve security and mastery only by leaving his class. The consumer’s cooperative movement was a partial exception to this on the side of consumption: far more important ultimately than the spectacular wage-battles that were fought during this period; but it did not touch the organization of the factory itself. Unfortunately, on the terms of the class struggle, there was no means of preparing the worker for the final results of his conquest. The struggle was in itself an education for warfare, not for industrial management and production.
The battle was constant and bitter, and it was conducted without mercy on the part of the exploiting classes, who used the utmost brutality that the police and the soldiery were capable of, on occasion, to break the resistance of the workers. In the course of this war one or another part of the proletariat—chiefly the more skilled occupations—made definite gains in wages and hours, and they shook oil the more degrading forms of wage-slavery and sweating: but the fundamental condition remained unaltered. Meanwhile, the machine process itself, with its matter-of-fact procedure, its automatism, its impersonality, its reliance upon the specialized services and intricate technological studies of the engineer, was getting further and further beyond the worker’s unaided power of intellectual apprehension or political control.
Marx’s original prediction that the class struggle would be fought out on strict class lines between an impoverished international proletariat and an equally coherent international bourgeoisie was falsified by two unexpected conditions.
One was the growth of the middle classes and the small industries: instead of being automatically wiped out they showed unexpected resistance and staying power. In a crisis, the big industries with their vast over-capitalization and their enormous overhead, were less capable of adjusting themselves to the situation than the smaller ones. In order to make the market more secure, there were even fitful attempts to raise the standard of consumption among the workers themselves: so the sharp lines necessary for successful warfare only emerged in periods of depression.
The second fact was the new alignment of forces between country and country, which tended to undermine the internationalism of capital and disrupt the unity of the proletariat. When Marx wrote in the eighteen fifties Nationalism seemed to him, as it seemed to Cobden, to be a dying movement: events showed that, on the contrary, it had taken a new lease on life. With the massing of the population into national states which continued during the nineteenth century, the national struggle cut at right angles to the class struggle. After the French revolution war, which was once the sport of dynasties, became the major industrial occupation of whole peoples: “democratic” conscription made this possible.
Fear and Struggle
Competition: struggle for existence: domination and submission: extinction. With war at once the main stimulus, the underlying basis, and the direct destination of this society, the normal motives and reactions of human beings were narrowed down to the desire for domination and to the fear of annihilation—the fear of poverty, the fear of unemployment, the fear of losing class status, the fear of starvation, the fear of mutilation and death.
When war finally came, it was welcomed with open arms, for it relieved the intolerable suspense: the shock of reality, however grim, was more bearable than the constant menace of spectres, worked up and paraded forth by the journalist and the politician. The mine and the battlefield underlay all the paleotechnic activities; and the practices they stimulated led to the widespread exploitation of fear. The rich feared the poor and the poor feared the rent collector: the middle classes feared the plagues that came from the vile insanitary quarters of the industrial city and the poor feared, with justice, the dirty hospitals to which they were taken.
The school was regimented like an army, and the army camp became the universal school: teacher and pupil feared each other, even as did capitalist and worker. Walls, barred windows, barbed wire fences surrounded the factory as well as the jail. Women feared to bear children and men feared to beget them: the fear of syphilis and gonorrhea tainted sexual intercourse: behind the diseases themselves lurked Ghosts: the spectre of locomotor ataxia, paresis, insanity, blind children, crippled legs, and the only known remedy for syphilis, till salvarsan, was itself a poison. The drab prisonlike houses, the palisades of dull streets, the treeless backyards filled with rubbish, die unbroken rooftops, with never a gap for park or playground, underlined this environment of death.
Time as a commodity…
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.
From now on filling time and killing time became important considerations: the early paleo-technic 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: where the occupation permitted, the worker often reciprocated when the employer’s back was turned.
Time, in short, was a commodity in the sense that money had become a commodity. Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as a heinous waste. The paleotechnic world did not heed Wordsworth’s Expostulation and Reply: it had no mind to sit upon an old gray stone and dream its time away. Just as, on one hand, the filling up of time-compartments became a duty, so the necessity of “cutting things short” made itself manifest, too.
Speed
Poe attributed the vogue of the short-story in the forties to the need for brief snatches of relaxation in the routine of a busy day. The immense growth of periodical literature during this period, following the cheap, large-scale production of the steam-driven printing press (1814) was likewise a mark of the increasing mechanical division of time. While the three-volume novel served the sober domestic habits of the Victorian middle classes, the periodical— quarterly, monthly, daily, and finally almost hourly—served the bulk of the popular needs. Human pregnancies still lasted nine months; but the tempo of almost everything else in life was speeded, the span was contracted, and the limits were arbitrarily clipped, not in terms of the function and activity, but in terms of a mechanical system of time accountancy.
Mechanical periodicity took the place of organic and functional periodicity in every department of life where the usurpation was possible. The spread of rapid transportation occasioned a change in the method of time-keeping itself. Sun time, which varies a minute every eight miles as one travels from east to west, could no longer be observed. Instead of a local time based upon the sun, it was necessary to have a conventional time belt, and to change abruptly by a whole hour when one entered the next time belt. Standard time was imposed by the transcontinental railroads themselves in 1875 in the United States, ten years before the regulations for standard time were officially promulgated at a World Congress.
This carried to a conclusion that standardization of time that had begun with the foundation of the Greenwich observatory two hundrea years before, and had been carried further, first on the sea, by comparing ship’s chronometers with Greenwich time. The entire planet was now divided off into a series of time-belts. This orchestrated actions over wider areas than had ever been able to move simultaneously before. Mechanical time now became second nature: the acceleration of the tempo became a new imperative for industry and “progress.”
Mechanical Triumphs
The human gains in the paleotechnic phase were small: perhaps for the mass of the population non-existent: the progressive and utilitarian John Stuart Mill, was at one here with the most bitter critic of the new regime, John Ruskin. But a multitude of detailed advances were made in technics itself. Not merely did the inventors and machine-makers of the paleotechnic phase improve tools and refine the whole apparatus of mechanical production, but its scientists and philosophers, its poets and artists, helped lay the foundation for a more humane culture than that which had prevailed even during the eotechnic period.
Though science was only sporadically applied to industrial production, most notably perhaps, through Euler and Camus, in the improvement of gears, the pursuit of science went on steadily: the great advances made during the seventeenth century were matched once more in the middle of the nineteenth in the conceptual reorganization of every department of scientific thought— advances to which we attach the names of von Meyer, Mendelev, Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Claude Bernard, Johannes Miiller, Darwin, Mendel, Willard Gibbs, Mach, Quetelet, Marx, and Comte, to mention only some of the outstanding figures. Through this scientific work, technics itself entered a new phase, whose characteristics we shall examine in the next chapter. The essential continuity of science and technics remains a reality through all their shifts and phases.
Though for convenience I have talked of the paleotechnic phase in its past tense, it is still with us, and the methods and habits of thought it has produced still rule a great part of mankind. If they are not supplanted, the very basis of technics itself may be undermined, and our relapse into barbarism will go on at a speed directly proportional to the complication and refinement of our present technological inheritance. But the truly significant part of the paleotechnic phase lay not in what it produced but in what it led to: it was a period of transition, a busy, congested, rubbish-strewn avenue between the eotechnic and the neotechnic economies.
Institutions do not affect human life only directly: they also affect it by reason of the contrary reactions they produce. While humanly speaking the paleotechnic phase was a disastrous interlude, it helped by its very disorder to intensify the search for order, and by its special forms of brutality to clarify the goals of humane living. Action and reaction were equal—and in opposite directions.