Our chief reason for over-rating the importance of tools and machines is that man's most significant early inventions, in ritual, social organization, morals, and language, left no material remains, while stone tools can be associated with recognizable hominid bones for at least half a million years.
American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology and literary critic (1895-1990)
Lewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian of technology and science, also noted for his study of cities.
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This immense 'negative creativity' constantly nullified the real gains of the machine. The booty brought back from a successful military expedition was, economically speaking, a 'total expropriation.' But it proved to be a poor substitute, as the Romans were later to discover, for a permanent income tax derived annually from a thriving economic organization. As with the later pillage of gold from Peru and Mexico by the Spaniards, this 'easy money' must often have undermined the victor's economy. When such imperial robber-economies became prevalent and preyed on each other, they cancelled out the possibility of one-sided gain. The economic result was as irrational as the military means.
If the Eloquent peasant finally obtained justice, as seems indicated at the point where the document breaks off, it was only, we should remember, after he had been teased and tormented, even flogged, by his betters merely to increase their amusement over his delightful impudence in standing up for his rights and answering back.
There was no reason whatever to make a wholesale choice between handicraft and machine production: between a single contemporary part of the technological pool and all the other past accumulations. But there was a genuine reason to maintain as many diverse units in this pool as possible, in order to increase the range of both human choices and technological inventiveness. Many of the machines of the nineteenth century, as Kropotkin pointed out, were admirable auxiliaries to handicraft processes, once they could be scaled, like the efficient small electric motor, to the small workshop and the personally controlled operation. William Morris and his colleagues, who almost single-handed salvaged and restored one ancient craft after another, by personally mastering the arts of dyeing, weaving, embroidering, printing, glass-painting, paper-making, book-binding, showed superior technological insight to those who scoffed at their romanticism.
The underlying assumption of this system is that wealth, leisure, comfort, health, and a long life belonged by right only to the dominant minority; while hard work and constant deprivation and denial, a 'slaves' diet and an early death, became the lot of the mass of men.
Once this division was established, is it any wonder that the dreams of the working classes throughout history, at least in those relatively happy periods when they dared to tell each other fairy stories, was a desire for idle days and for a surfeit of material goods? These desires were kept from an explosive eruption, perhaps, by the institution of occasional feasts and carnivals. But the dreams of an existence which counterfeited closely that of the ruling classes, as the brummagen jewelry worn by the poor in Victorian England imitated in brass the gold baubles of the upper classes, have remained alive from age to age: indeed they are still an active ingredient in the fantasy of effortless affluence that currently hovers like a pink smog over Megalopolis.
If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing. This method of translating speech into graphic record not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written orders were not carried out. Accountability and the written word both went along historically with the control of large numbers; and it is no accident that the earliest uses of writing were not to convey ideas, religious or otherwise, but to keep temple records of grain, cattle, pottery, fabricated goods, stored and disbursed. This happened early, for a pre-dynastic Narmer mace in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford records the taking of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The arithmetical reckoning was an even greater feat than the capture.
The cycle of conquest, extermination, and revenge is the chronic condition of all 'civilized' states, and as Plato observed, war is their 'natural' condition. Here, as was so often to happen later, the invention of the megamachine, as the perfected instrument of royal power, produced the new purposes that it was later supposed to serve. In this sense, the invention of the military machine made war 'necessary' and even desirable, just as the invention of the jet plane has made mass tourism 'necessary' and profitable.
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In Ahab and in his beatnik, quasi-criminal prototype, Jackson (in 'Redburn'), Melville gave expression both to the megatechnic 'Khans' of the global Pentagon and to the counter-forces they had brought into being. And the fact that Ahab's torment and hatred had gone so far that he had lost control of himself and, through his own mad reliance upon power, had become dominated completely by the creature that had disabled him, only makes Melville's story a central parable in the interpretation of modern man's destiny. In Ahab's throwing away compass and sextant at the height of the chase, Melville even anticipated the casting out of the orderly instruments of intelligence, so characteristic of the counter-culture and anti-life happenings of today. Similarly, by his maniacal concentration, Ahab rejects the inner change that might have saved the ship and the crew, when he turns a deaf ear to the pleas of love uttered by sober Starbuck in words and by Pip, a fright-shocked child and an African primitive, in dumb gesture.
Outwardly mankind is still committed tot he grim chase Melville described, lured by the adventure, the prospect of oil and whalebone, the promptings of pride, an above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power. But it has also begun consciously to face the prospect of total annihilation, which may be brought about by the captains who now have command of the ship.
Against that senseless fate every act of rebellion, every exhibition of group defiance, every assertion of the will-to-live, every display of autonomy and self-direction, at however primitive a level, diminishes the headway of the doom-threatened ship and delays the fatal moment when the White Whale will shatter its planks and drown the crew. All the infantile, criminal, and imbecile manifestations in the arts today, everything that now expresses only murderous hatred and alienation, might still find justification if they performed their only conceivable rational function-that of awakening modern
Space Rockets as Power Symbols
The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.
The very successes of the megamachine re-enforced dangerous potentialities that had hitherto been kept in check by sheer human weakness. The inherent infirmity of this whole power system lies exposed in the fact that kings, exalted above all other men, were constantly cozened, flattered, and fed with misinformation-zealously protected from any disturbing counterbalancing 'feedback.' So kings never learned from either their own experience or from history the fact that unqualified power is inimical to life: that their methods were self-defeating, their military victories were ephemeral, and their exalted claims were fraudulent and absurd.
From the end of the first great Age of the Builders in Egypt, that of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh, Pepe I, comes corroborative evidence of this pervasive irrationality, all the more telling because it issues from the relatively orderly and unbedevilled Egyptians:
The army returned in safety
After it had hacked up the land of the Sand Dwellers
...After it had thrown down its enclosures...
After it had cut down its fig trees and vines...
After it had cast fire into all its dwellings...
After it had killed troops in it by many ten-thousand.
That sums up the course of Empire everywhere: the same boastful words, the same vicious acts, the same sordid results, from the earliest Egyptian palette to the latest American newspaper with its reports, at the moment I write, of the mass atrocities coldbloodedly perpetrated with the aid of napalm bombs and defoliating poisons, by the military forces of the United States on the helpless peasant populations of Vietnam: an innocent people, uprooted, terrorized, poisoned and roasted alive in a futile attempt to make the power fantasies of the American military-industrial-scientific elite 'credible.
In his conception of science's method and role, then, Descartes openly followed the style of the Renascence despot; he preferred absolute government, with its Procrustean simplifications, to democratic government, with its divided powers, its tenacious traditions, its embarrassing historic contradictions, its confusion and compromises and obscurities. But the acceptance of the latter is in fact the necessary price for a method capable of embracing the complexities of life without leaving any function or purpose unrecognized, uncounted, or uncared for. By his penchant for political absolutism Descartes paved the way for the eventual militarization of both science and technics.
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"The new prophets were men of a modest humane disposition: they brought life back to the village scale and the normal human dimensions; and out of this weakness they made a new kind of strength, not recognized in the palace or the marketplace. These meek, withdrawn, low-keyed, outwardly humble men appeared alone, or with a handful of equally humble followers, unarmed, unprotected. They did not look for institutional support: on the contrary, they dared to condemn and defy those in established positions, even predicting their downfall if they continued their established practices: "Mene, mene, tekel upharsin." "Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting."
Even more intransigently than kings, the Axial prophets dared depart from customary usages and traditions, not only those of civilization, but the sexual cults, with their orgies and sacrifices that derived from neolithic practices. For them, nothing was sacred that did not lead to a higher life; and by higher they meant emancipated from both materialistic display and animal urgencies. Against the personified corporate power of kingship they stood for the precise opposite: the power of personality in each living soul."