Techniques and Civilization — Cultural Preparation
This is a summary from the chapter Cultural Preparation of the book Techniques and Civilization written by Lewis Mumford.
Machines, Utilities and “The Machine”
The first question Lewis Mumford try to answer is: What is a machine?
A machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinant motions
— Franz Reuleaux
Mumford says that the Reuleaux definition is a classic but not complete. We must differentiate machine from tools. The difference between tools and machines lies primarily in the degree of automatism they have reached. Tools increase the human capacity. Machines has less human intervention.
We must remember that, when the book were written in 1934, the radio was the most recent technology. At that time, no one can imagine the modern world, even the sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov that has the best view.
Now we can introduce a new kind of machine the intelligent agents. At this moment there is millions of agents reading and processing data. Google has an agent that reads all the internet and index all data into a database.
Intelligent agents continuously perform three functions: perception of dynamic conditions in the environment; action to affect conditions in the environment; and reasoning to interpret perceptions, solve problems, draw inferences, and determine actions.
In the next few years, we will have a new kind of intelligent machine like drones, automated cars and facing detectors that try to find subjective date from your face.
The Monastery and the Clock
The modern era starts with the clock.
The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.
The monastery was the first place in history where time was measure. Benedict added a seventh period to the devotion of the day, and in the seventh century, by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the canonical hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became necessary.
With the Benedictines, the bases of capitalism were created:
- A way of measure time
- A way of synchronizing the actions of men
The mechanical clock were invented in 1370 by Heinrich von Wyck.
Now all our biological world were subordinate to the clock. We do not eat when we are hungry, we eat when it is time to eat. We do not sleep when we are tired, we sleep when it is time to sleep.
Time is not a sequence of experiences anymore, but a collection our hours. We can measure time and create tools for time saving.
Time is money.
Space, Distance, Movement
Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century the conception of space changed. In medieval era, space was where cosmic and religious order exists.
We can easily see that in the Hereford Map from 1314, where Rome and Paris are mixed with Eden and Noah’s Ark.
The discovery of the laws of perspective has desacralized the space.
We can see in Andrea Bianco World Map from 1436 that no religious symbol was used.
Now with the idea of time and space, we can construct ideas as movement, velocity and acceleration.
The Influence of Capitalism
According with Mumford, the rise of capitalism create the structure of the market and the market could sponsor the rise of the machines.
At the end of middle age, the world changed from a barter economy to a money economy. Independents workshops became factories. Familiar business, now have became more mechanized.
Capitalism utilized the machine, not to further social welfare, but to increase private profit.
Mumford ignores all others social changes in Europe, like Reformation and Enlightenment only analyzing economic questions. If you read the text, you will fell like a great conspiracy has taken over Europe.
From Fable to Fact
Now Mumford analyses the greater change from the end of medieval era: the desacralization of the nature. His review is a little naive, because ignore all religious movements that occurs in Europe, but it is correct to show how the way of think changed to the modern man.
The naive feeling of the thirteenth century artist turned into the systematic exploration of the sixteenth century botanist and physiologists.
He has ignored that the shift from a Catholic-pagan to a Protestant European can influence the scientific endeavor. Then quotes Enlightenment thinkers and their ideals of technical-scientific control.
Nature existed to be explored, to be invaded, to be conquered, and finally, to be understood.
The Obstacle of Animism
Other obstacle that were overtaken for the rise of the machines were the Animism.
Animism is the idea where all places or objects has an spiritual representation. Like Gaia in Greek mythology represent the earth. But Mumford limites the animism idea to a christian animism
Here the animism was extruded by a sense of the omnipotence of a single Spirit, refined, by the very enlargement of His duties, out of any semblance of merely human or animal capacities.
When the order was transfer from God to the machine, so it begin a desacralization of the nature.
The original advances in modern technics became possible only when a mechanical system could be isolated from the entire tissue of relations.
The Road Through Magic
In old cultures magic was a kind of knowledge, and it reveals the will to control the nature. The main difference between magic and science was that magic doesn’t have a developed method.
No one can put his finger on the place where magic became science, where empiricism became systematic experimentalism, where alchemy became chemistry, where astrology became astronomy, in short, where the need for immediate human results and gratifications ceased to leave its smudgy imprint.
The Social Regimentation
According with Mumford, the leaders of Western Civilization had discovery how to turn humans into machine before machine exists.
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 measure out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy’s father, witch coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock.
The Protestant Reformation changed the Europe way of thinking time management. Time is a precious resource.
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.
A materialistic mind arose during the Reformation, and removed from the common mind the idea that have money is a sin.
In the new economic system man was for himself. The dominant virtues were thrift, foresight, skillful adaptation of means. Invention took the place of image-making and ritual; experiment took place of contemplation; demonstration took the place of deductive logic and authority. Even alone on a desert island the sober middle class virtues would carry one through…
Protestantism re-enforced these lessons of middle class sobriety and gave then God’s sanction. True: the main devices of finance where a product of Catholic Europe, and Protestantism has received undeserved praise as a liberating fore from medieval routine and undeserved censure as the original source and spiritual justification of modern capitalism.
The protestant mind gave to the world a monastic routine. Everything in our daily life should be controlled. Remember, Luther was a monk!
These were the realities and the imperatives of the middle class philosophy. Apart from the surviving scheme of divine salvation all its impulses where already put under the rule of weight and measure and quantity: day and life where complete regimented. In the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin, who had perhaps been anticipated by Jesuits, capped the process by inventing a system of moral book-keeping.
The spirituals things were removed from common life, only material things exists. Even the final hope became material: the machine.
Mechanics became the new religion, and it gave to the world a new Messiah: the machine.
The Mechanical Universe
The natural philosophy from the seventeenth century create a mechanical worldview (WeltBild). For a scientific propose, all the sciences reduces the reality to observe it.
The method of the physical sciences rested fundamentally upon a few simple principles. First: the elimination of qualities, and the reduction of the complex to the simple by paying attention only to these aspects of events which could be weighed, measured, or be controlled and repeated — or, as in astronomy, whose repetition could be predicted, Second: concentration upon the outer world, and the elimination or neutralization of the observer as respects the data witch works. Third: isolation: limitation of the field: specialization of interest and subdivision of labor.
The world analyzed by science is not the real world, is a reduction of it. The organic part is removed, only the mechanical parts are really necessary. The subjective qualities are removed, only what can be measure exists. Everything is a machine for science: bodies, cultures, cities, populations, even God (for whom believes in him).
To reach objective results, the science remove all subjective values. Taste, colors, smells and sounds doesn’t exists for science.
In other words, physical science confined itself to the so-called primary qualities: the secondary qualities are spurned as subjectives. (…) The value of concentration upon primary qualities was that it neutralized in experiments and analysis the sensory and emotional reactions of the observer: apart from the process of thinking, he became an instrument of record.
The Duty to Invent
To invent became a duty. Inventions are now everywhere, in our houses, our farms, our works. Inventions are sometimes good and sometimes bad. We expect new inventions, and the quality of this inventions doesn’t matter.
The point is that invention had became a duty, and the desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child’s delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by a critical discernment: people agreed that inventions were good, whether or not they actually provided benefits, just as they agreed that child-bearing was good, whether the offspring proved a blessing to society or a nuisance.
Mechanical inventions, even more than science, was the answer to a dwindling faith and a faltering life-impulse.
Practical Anticipations
We live in the era of natural philosophers. They are all alive today, they dream is the reality! They had dreamed that the machine will took an important place in the society and inventors and scientists will be the society heroes, instead of politicians or generals.
The leading utopias of the time, Christianopolis, the City of the Sun, to say nothing of Bacon’s fragment or Cyrano de Bergerac’s minor works, all brood upon the possibility of utilizing the machine to make the world more perfect: the machine was the substitute for Plato’s justice, temperance, and courage, even as it was likewise for the Christian ideals of grace and redemption. The machine came forth as the new demiurge that was to create a new heaven and a new earth: at the least, as a new Moses that was to lead a barbarous humanity into the promised land.
