Techniques and Civilization — Agents of Mechanization
This is a summary from the chapter Agents of Mechanization of the book Techniques and Civilization written by Lewis Mumford.
The Profile of Technics
Since the beginning of mankind, the civilization is accumulating technic. It starts with the man living and cultivating near a river, and step by step, the man create the empires.
Indeed, the age of invention is only another name for the ages of man. If man is rarely found in the “state of nature” it is only because nature is so constantly modified by technics.
De Re Metallica
Quarry and Mining are primitive activities and they remained primitive until recente years (comparing with others human activities). The result of mining is precious but “mining was not regarded as a human art”. The mine environment is a dead environment, there is no live, no trees, no animals, nothing except rocks and dangerous things. “The mine, to begin with, is the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived by man”.
A miner reflects his environment, he is a brute man. He is satisfied by a simple life, because everything is a better place than a mine.
Mining and Modern Capitalism
The industry, capitalism and the machine starts with the mining. After the fifteenth century, free men start works in mining. They already have nothing, and there was the guild collapses, so this was the free land for capitalists. There was, at this time, a crescent necessity for iron, and a miner is a cheep worker. This situation gaves good profits that improves mechanization, increasing the profits.
As two of the greatest fortunes of modern times have been founded upon monopolies of petroleum and aluminum, so the great fortune of the Fuggers in the sixteenth century was founded upon the silver and lead mines of Styria and Tyrol and Spain.
The Primitive Engineer
The woodman is the primitive of the engineer. They created almost all tools that existed in primitive societies. They provide energy, wheels, houses, weapons, buildings, bridges.
Wood gave man his preparatory training in the technics of both stone and metal: small wonder that he was faithful to it when began to translate his wooden temples into stone. And cunning of the woodman is at the base of the most important post-neolithic achievements in the development of the machine. Take away wood, and one takes away literally the props of modern technics.
From Game-Hunt to Man-Hunt
Nothing has changed in the history of technics like soldiers. It begins with hunting, the hunter create a wide variety of weapons. So the hunter start to have power over other human groups, then it begins to make war.
While pottery, basketwork, wine-making, grain-growing show only superficial improvements from neolithic times onward, the improvements of war has been constant.
The simple existence of weapons can create a controlled society. Modern industrialism may equally well be termed a large scale military operation.
The weapon, even when it is not used to inflict death, is nevertheless a means for enforcing a pattern of human behavior which would not be accepted unless the alternative were physical mutilation or death: it is, in short, a means of creating a dehumanized response in the enemy or the victim.
Warfare and Invention
War has been the chief propagator of the machine. War demands inventions, inventions creates more power. It creates a partnership between the soldier, miner, the technician, and the scientist establishing a new type of industrial director: the militar engineer.
The army is in fact the ideal form toward which a purely mechanical system of industry must tend.
Military Mass-Production
The division of labor, factory organization and standardization are keys of modern industry, but it was created my the army. The army also created the social organization of the modern capitalism. The feudal army was based on forty-days service, changed after to a paid workers that are more efficient than intermittent workers.
The regimentation and mass-production of soldiers, to the end of turning out a cheap, standardized, and replacement product, was the great contribution of the military mind.
Drill and Deterioration
The militarization lead to one big problems: superiority.
Physical power is a rough substitute for patience and intelligence and cooperative effort in the governance of men: if used as a normal accompaniment of action instead of a last resort it is a sign of extreme social weakness.
A soldier is taught to use his strength to control any situation. A strong army easily control a race of slaves. But there is a balance, the smartest minds do not prefer the army. And the army, historically resist to inventions.
It was unfortunate for society at large that a power-organization like the army, rather that the more humane and cooperative craft guild, presided over the birth of the modern forms of the machine.
Mars and Venus
With the breakdown of medieval mind, arises a new way of thinking that allows luxury, private possession. A new court and a new city has arisen, and they pay for new technologies.
With the medieval restriction to usury flouted under the church in the fifteenth century and abandoned even in theory by the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, the legal mechanism for acquisition on grand scale went hand in hand with the social and psychological demand for an acquisitive life.
The first use of steam-engine was to create magical effects in a temple. The helicopter was a toy.
Consumptive Pull and Productive Drive
Goods had became a important part of the culture in the modern world. The houses changed. Now, we have more tools in our houses.
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, often grudgingly med — not a center of continuous and overwhelming interest. In the past, even in Westerner Europe, men had worked 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 a 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 energy.
This new necessity of consumption create a new productive impulse.
With the weakening of the castle lines and the development of bourgeois individualism the ritual of conspicuous expenditure spread rapidly throughout the rest of society: it justifies the abstractions of money-makers and put to wider uses the technical progress of inventors.
Goods became a way to acquire happiness and pleasure in life.
The 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 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 it success. (…) Happiness and expanding production were one.
