Technics and Civilization

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Technics and Civilization written by Lewis Mumford in the 1930s (published in 1934) gives the history of technology and its interplay in shaping and being shaped by civilizations. He asserts that the development of modern technology, rather than springing up during the Industrial Revolution, has its roots in the Middle Ages. He argues it is the moral, the economic, and the political choices we make, not the machines we use that has produced a capitalist industrialized machine-oriented economy, whose imperfect fruits serve the majority so imperfectly.

The development of technology is divided into three overlapping phases: eotechnic, paleotechnic and neotechnic. In the first phase (1000 to 1800) Mumford starts technically-civilized life off with the clock, to him the most important basis for the development of capitalism because time becomes fungible (thus tranferrable). The clock is the most important prototype for all other machines. He contrasts the development and use of glass, wood, wind and water with the inhumanly horrific work that goes in to mining and smelting metal. The use of all of these materials, and the development of science during the eotechnic phase, is based on the abstraction from life of the elements that could be measured. He approves those people, cities and cultures who strove for a harmonious balance between the senses and the freedom from labor provided by science: "the goal of eotechnic civilization as a whole...was not more power alone but a greater intensification of life: color, perfume, images, music, sexual ecstasy, as well as daring exploits in arms and thought and exploration." (149).

The second phase, the paleotechnic (roughly 1700 to 1900), is "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 nature." (p.154) Inventions of the paleotechnic are made by men trying to solve specific problems rather than hunting for general scientific principles; in fact, scientific learning is devalued by men of business. The invention of coal-fired steam powered factories and the installation of capital-intensive machinery leads to a necessarily gigantic round-the-clock scale of production supported by unskilled machine tenders. Labour becomes a commodity, rather than an inalienable set of skills, the labourer who tended machines, lived in slums, and was paid starvation wages, became physically stunted and socially and spiritually stultified. Mumford notes that the death rate of urban slums compares unfavorably to the agricultural worker of the same time period, and furthermore that life in the 19th city compares unfavorably to cleanliness and standards of living available to workers in 13th centuries cities (p.183). He also identifies iron as the primary building material of the paleotechnic, and skyscrapers, bridges and steamships as premiere accomplishments of the age. War and mass sport he saw as social releases from mechanized life, and the hysteric duties of wartime production (or even the hysteria of a baseball team's victory) is a natural outgrowth of the tensions and structures of such paleotechnic life.

In describing the neotechnic age (from about 1900 to Mumford's present, 1930), he focuses on the invention of electricity, freeing the factory production line from the restrictions of coal through the addition of small electric engines to individual machines, and freeing the laborer to create small but competitive factories. Mumford presciently notes that a small producer can deliver what is needed when it is needed more efficiently than paleotechnic assembly lines. The neotechnic phase he saw was dominated by men of science, rather than mechanically apt machinists. Rather than pursuing accomplishments on the scale of the trains, it is concerned with the invisible, the rare, the atomic level of change and innovation. Compact and lightweight aluminum is the metal of the neotechnic, and communication and information --even inflated amounts -- he claimed was the coin.