On Technics and Civilization

Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization is one of those rare, great achievements of scholarship. Mumford synthesizes roughly eight hundred years of the history of technology while advancing an argument that remains relevant today, even though the book first appeared in 1934 — and, more impressive still, his prose is on the level of the finest littérateur. The book goes beyond analysis; he’s as strong a wordsmith as he is a historian. From the first chapter he braces us with statements that, under scrutiny, become harder and harder to argue against — “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age,” for one, which he elaborates with a sentence like this:

In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire.

Mumford’s organization of technological development is tripartite. Rather than begin the industrial age with the steam engine, he finds its origin in the thirteenth century, with the increasing use of wood and glass; the primary power was water, wind, and wood, things already out there waiting to be used, and with them the would-be (or paleo-) scientists made advances in optics, measurement, clocks, windmills and watermills, and much else that gave humans more control over production. He calls this the “eotechnic” period — eo- being the Greek for “dawn,” the dawn of technics. The eotechnic was followed by the paleotechnic, what we usually call the industrial period, defined above all by iron and coal, the hard resources of the mines, in service of raising the rate of production, with steam as its fuel; most factories as we’d recognize them are products of this age, though smaller workshops existed in the eotechnic. The third is the neotechnic, the age of light alloys (aluminum especially) and steel, powered by electricity. Mumford seems to have believed Western society was on the cusp of leaving the neotechnic, and that the technical acceleration of his day would slow and resettle at a new equilibrium. Looking back, we know that’s hardly what happened: a fourth period might be called the cybertechnic era, and rather than having entered some age of automation, I suspect we’re still properly in it — its materials are silicon, lithium, cobalt, and the rare earths, still powered by electricity, though you could argue the flow of information is itself a kind of power source.

The final three chapters analyze specific aspects of the present age — compensations, reversions, the way we’ve assimilated the machine into ourselves, our orientations toward the future — and they’re especially interesting, since they tell us what all the history might mean. Mumford points to “the ideal goal of a completely mechanized and automatized system of power production: the elimination of work: the universal achievement of leisure.” David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is given over to exactly this question, as are many other works: given how far productivity has risen, thanks to the machine, we should in theory have nearly unlimited free time for our own pursuits. What happened? He also criticizes the way we distinguish the artwork from the machine, when both are the work of human hands:

By what inept logic must we bow to our creation if it be a machine, and spurn it as “unreal” if it happens to be a painting or a poem? The machine is just as much a creature of thought as the poem: the poem is as much a fact of reality as the machine. Those who use the machine when they need to react to life directly or employ the humane arts, are as completely lacking in efficiency as if they studied metaphysics in order to learn how to break bread. The question in each case is: what is the appropriate life-reaction? How far does this or that instrument further the biological purposes or the ideal ends of life?

That critique lands just as hard on the technological determinists and techno-utopians of today, more than ninety years on: the machine is one tool among many, not the solution to all our ills, even if it has its time and place. Mumford rightly sees technology as a potential good, but one that’s as much about how we humans harness it as about the thing itself:

The real social distinction of modern technics, however, is that it tends to eliminate social distinctions. Its immediate goal is effective work. Its means are standardization: the emphasis of the generic and the typical: in short, conspicuous economy. Its ultimate aim is leisure—that is, the release of other organic capacities. The powerful esthetic side of this social process has been obscured by speciously pragmatic and pecuniary interests that have inserted themselves into our technology and have imposed themselves upon its legitimate aims.

Had the book been written today, in terser prose, I’d have thought he was speaking to the contest between Andrew Yang’s call for Universal Basic Income and the tech barons. It should be obvious to all of us that life isn’t about the sheer accumulation of resources:

By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial leaders have neglected the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development, expression. Paying infinite attention to the invention and perfection of incubators, they have forgotten the egg, and its reason for existence.

Mumford closes by thinking about the future. Even in the 1930s it was clear to him that petroleum and natural gas were at risk of running out, and while he’s skeptical of atomic energy (not yet produced when he wrote), he points to alternative sources near at hand — the very ones we’re developing now:

Apart from the doubtful possibility of harnessing inter-atomic energy, there is the much nearer one of utilizing the sun’s energy directly in sun-converters or of utilizing the difference in temperature between the lower depths and the surface of the tropical seas: there is likewise the possibility of applying on a wide scale new types of wind turbine, like the rotor: indeed, once an efficient storage battery was available the wind alone would be sufficient, in all probability, to supply any reasonable needs for energy.

In the final pages he admires the Soviet Union’s progress without seeing it as a serious way forward; he’s a Communist, though not a Marxist, and I suspect he’d fall in with Milwaukee’s “Sewer Socialists” or the trade-union movement — pragmatic, recognizing that all the ingredients for prosperity already exist and ought to be used to further human ends. I think he’d appreciate the degrowth thinkers, and solarpunk aesthetics, though that may be me reading too far into him. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, and an especially useful wake-up call for the techno-utopians who’d elevate the machine for its own sake — who are, unfortunately, the people least likely to read it. If you have the time and the willingness to work through Mumford’s dense but jaw-dropping prose, it’s not to be missed.