A Civilization of Technics Part 1

 A Civilization of Technics

Philip Mairet (1945)

When Marco Polo was an old man in Venice in the early fourteenth century, his marvellous accounts of his travels in China, as an emissary to the court of the Great Khan, were not always received with implicit belief. When he spoke about the black stone that the Chinese dug out of the ground and used as fuel, because it gave a fiercer and more enduring heat than wood-fuel, the traveller's veracity was doubted: it is even said that the priests tried to make him recant so palpable a falsehood on his deathbed, and without avail. No doubt such a statement appeared more than fictitious, almost heretical, as a falsification of the received order of God's creation. It seems unlikely that the priests had any premonition of the moral dangers that might ensue if the tale -were true. Yet the possession of so much available power under the earth was destined to complicate the moral problems of society far more than even the mining of gold had ever done.

The cosmic quantities of power lying latent in the world's supply of mineral fuel could have been put to little use without that development of mechanical contrivances which is still proceeding at an ever-accelerat­ing speed. It has been a development of machines primarily, and of tools only instrumentally. The machine, it is true, is a kind of magnified or elaborated tool; but there is a clear distinction in principle. The tool is an instrument directly wielded by the worker upon his work; whereas the machine introduces an element of automatism entirely absent from the tool as such. There are plenty of hybrid examples—mechanical tools—but the distinction is functionally real and apparent. A rifle, for instance, is a killing tool; a Lewis gun is a killing machine, although it is also a tool. A power loom, six or ten of which will go on weaving as many different patterns of cloth with only one operator to supervise their work, is a machine out-and-out: and there are machines which perform, no less automatically, a whole series of complex operations, ingurgitating several materials at one end and delivering, at the other end, finished articles fabricated, tested, counted, packed, and labelled, all with faultless accu­racy. The ingenuity which has contrived to get so much of our work done by pure automatism is not in itself of a higher order than mankind has shown in countless crafts and tools of the past, nor essentially different. Our ingenuity has only been stimulated to far more sustained and im­pressive effect by the supply of solar energy in forms convenient for release as required.

The machine, therefore, must not be considered as the expression of a faculty new, or even newly discovered, in Man; but of a faculty newly provided with greater means of expression than it ever had before. It is a question whether technology has led to an over-development and an excessive use of this faculty. It has certainly enabled Man to produce a great superfluity of certain kinds of the goods and appurtenances of his life; but this also is not a novel social capacity. It has been apparent for ages that, even without machines, the energies of well-organized societies are capable of producing large surpluses over the elementary needs of their existence. Every great culture of the past has expressed itself in mighty works of supererogation before wasting itself in works of war or frivolity. But in a merely tool-using society, the production of this surplus still depends upon the application of most of its members to heavy manual labour, much of which can be little better than purely repetitive muscular exertion. Where an indefinitely large proportion of the population accepts —or is able to be kept in—this state of life it is because they are more or less in sympathy with the great works to which the surplus social produc­tion is directed. These great works of' over-production' are such as to rule the imagination of men, and, in some sort, vicariously to realize their aspirationsⁱ.

The question, to what works the surplus energy of a civilization shall be devoted is, however, altered in form by the discovery of mechanical power-sources. At first sight, there would seem to be less need for great public works to sustain morale by their prestige, since a less laborious life might relax the severity of social discipline. On the other hand, the pro­blem is magnified because the surplus energy is so much greater. Society, no longer weighted or ballasted by the obvious necessity of a slaving or even of a labouring class, yet disposes of collective powers which are far greater than ever. To what ought they to be applied? What they are in fact applied to is not in doubt. They are applied, for the sake of exercising them and with a sovereign disregard of other values, to everything that they can conceivably be made to do, useful, useless, or destructive. Thus far society has succumbed to the fascination of a stimulant which magni­fies one of its own faculties almost to the miraculous, and has been enjoy­ing itself regardless; but this orgy has always been deprecated by the more thoughtful, whose apprehensions that it might have disruptive effects upon society are now being fulfilled beyond their worst fears.

The answer we are giving by our actions is thus chaotic, but a more coherent reply has been offered by the social reformers of recent and present times. These powers, they say, collectively generated, should be enjoyed individually and equally: they should be employed in giving the maximum satisfaction to the needs and desires of every single person. This has been assumed to be the correct reply to the challenge of the Industrial Revolution by its earlier critics; it is the implicit assumption in all the contentions of Marx and his followers, that the ' surplus value' produced by technological progress should be distributed equally to the benefit of the machine producers, who have been identified with mankind in general, in a vague confidence, perhaps, that almost all will be machine-minders in good time.

The age of machine-power is thus conceived, not without some reason, to have modified the status of Man in Nature. We find this notion ex­pressed often and in various ways, from the eloquent essay of an aesthete like Oscar Wilde in the 1890's (The Soul of Man under Socialism), to the recent writings of an engineer-economist, Major Douglas, who has calcu­lated that the amount of power generated in the power plants of the United Kingdom is equivalent to the provision of forty mechanical slaves to every household. In this view it would appear that we are in sight of a civilization in which no man's status is less than that of a master of many slaves—inanimate slaves who can be driven without humanitarian scruples. The expectation that all should accordingly be raised to the level of a leisured class is frequently expressed; and at the least there is a very strong feeling that the meaning of work has been radically changed.

The demands that social reformers continue to frame—legitimately enough—for embellishing the lives of the masses with more of the amenities of a modern economy, have always presupposed as a matter of course that the powers of the new class of' mechanical slaves'—if one may put it so—ought to be thus devoted to enriching the largest possible number of the people. The question whether this was the right use for the powers in question was never asked until this answer had been already assumed. But is it the whole truth? If we desire the enrichment of the human race in general, as a thing good in itself, we must consider what goods are comprised in the conception of riches. The wealth and well-being of Man consists not only in the quantity of goods, but in the balance and proportion between the different kinds of goods at his disposal. We have to inquire whether the employment of automata has the effect of increasing available goods and services equally or in harmonious pro­portion.

The answer is in the negative. Given right conceptions of wealth, and a benevolent but firm management of society, we should presumably em­ploy indefinitely great quantities of power to social advantage. Those thinkers who have given most study to plans for distributing the wealth of the power-age to the people have usually found the most need to postulate a centralized and unified control of production, because they have seen that power of itself stimulates production very unequally and tends towards unbalanced results. Under the competitive and individualist system of capitalist production this has been clearly demonstrated; there has been a hypertrophy of those economic functions of which power-machinery could most increase the output and efficiency, whilst other functions, no less valuable or necessary to life but less patient of stimula­tion by mechanical power, have suffered proportionately. This applies especially, though not exclusively, to the basic function of agriculture, in which a world-wide process of deterioration has been causing so much alarm. Agriculture would have to be specially protected in a civilization of technics, because technics benefit it relatively little: the biological pro­cesses that agriculture cherishes for use are of a different order from those which technology can control. Even where agriculture has availed itself most successfully of the work of the scientists and engineers, the rate of increase in its yields bears no comparison with the ever-multiplying pro­duction of factories producing such things as motors or electric bulbs. This discrepancy in the acceleration of output, when power is applied to techno-facture and agriculture respectively, tends to disbalance society alto-together, for a disproportionate amount of human energy and ambition flows into the occupations which technics make more profitable, and others tend actually to regress, indispensable though they are.

The socialist solution is to communize the ownership both of the sources of power and the means of applying it; so that competing groups would no longer be forcing the pace of whatever production their machinery put them in an advantageous position to undertake. All production would be planned in advance by a central authority. This, it is believed, would gradually direct all the energies of an ever more perfectly mechanized economic system to the production of goods and services in general demand—including, of course, agricultural goods. But so far, in the three great states which have thus assumed control of power and industry, the results are disappointing. All of them have, in a short space of time, devoted half or more than half of their power-machinery to the produc­tion of military equipment. Nor have they solved the problem of the regression of agriculture, for although each of them has, according to its lights, undertaken agricultural reforms with the aid of power-machinery and approved scientific methods, their land workers have shown the same disinclination as those of other industrial countries to continue in their vocation, so that these governments have had to resort to special induce­ments, to compulsion or to the importation of labour from abroad. These experiences may not discredit the socialist theory; it is still arguable that if states were grouped in such political and economic federations that together they contained ample resources of power, material, and food, they would not need to arm themselves excessively. The idea that States could thus be grouped in relatively self-sufficient federations after the war is now receiving intelligent consideration from many people, and it is believed that under these conditions, nations would be able to exploit machine-power fully to no other end but the enrichment of their citizens.

This dream of wealth through technology will not, and perhaps ought not to be given up; the attempt to realize it is sure to dominate post-war politics. Indeed it is not only legitimate, but may be realizable if only the thorny problems of agriculture and fertility can be solved. Their solution is bound to remain difficult, however, as long as the prestige of technics is elevated above that of cultivation. It is, socially, a question of the dignity of labour; of the difficulty, if we employ armies of mechanical slaves to work for us, of maintaining equal respect for those who still have to do work that the machines cannot do. At present there is undoubtedly a pre­vailing tendency to elevate the technical means, simply because they are so wonderful and ever-improving, above the ends they are supposed to serve: and where work is of a kind which does not lend itself to power-technique, the attempt is made to alter or adapt the work to the means. This does not mean that basic work, such as food-growing, can or will ever be neglected beyond a certain point, but it does mean that it will be done badly, to the injury of the product and the discontent of the producer. For men as producers are never contented unless they are allowed to seek per­fection in their work according to its own laws and conditions. If men are persuaded that they are only to produce corn and wine as by-products of social co-operation and technological progress, the quality of corn and wine, if not their quantity, will decline slowly but certainly, for men will apply their best will and intelligence to the advancement of the politics and science of production, not to the art of bettering the products.

Chapter from Prospect for Christendom: Essays in Catholic Social Reconstruction, Maurice Reckitt (ed), Faber and Faber (1945/6)

COMMENT: Parts 2 & 3 to follow.

i e.g., the idea, rather prevalent, that the Ancient Egyptians were driven by brutal taskmasters to the building of the Pyramids, the colossi, and the temples, is mainly erroneous. These works were often completed in scenes of popular enthusiasm and acclamation. Cf. Arthur Weigall on Ancient Egypt.

 

In the Absence of the Sacred Part 3

Jerry Mander

While planning to write these two books, however, it became apparent to me that their subjects were inseparable. They belonged together as one book. There is no way to understand the situation of Indians, Eskimos, Aborigines, island peoples, or other native societies without understanding the outside societies that act upon them. And there is no way to understand the outside societies without understanding their relationships to native peoples and to nature itself.

All things considered, it may be the central assumption of technological society that there is virtue in overpowering nature and native peoples. The Indian problem today, as it always has been, is directly related to the needs of technological societies to find and obtain remotely located resources, in order to fuel an incessant and intrinsic demand for growth and technological fulfilment. The process began in our country hundreds of years ago when we wanted land and gold. Today it continues because we want coal, oil, uranium, fish, and more land. As we survey the rest of the world - whether it is the Canadian Arctic, the Borneo jungle, or the Brazilian rainforest - the same interaction is taking place for the same reasons, often involving the same institutions.

All of these acts were and are made possible by one fundamental rationalization: that our society represents the ultimate expression of evolution, its final flowering. It is this attitude, and its corresponding belief that native societies represent an earlier, lower form on the evolutionary ladder, upon which we occupy the highest rung, that seem to unify all modern political perspectives: Right, Left, Capitalist, and Marxist.

Save for such nascent movements as bioregionalism and Green politics, which have at least questioned the assumptions underlying this attitude, most people in Western society are in agreement about our common superiority. So it becomes okay to humiliate - to find insignificant and thus subject to sacrifice - any way of life or way of thinking that stands in the way of a kind of "progress" we have invented, which is scarcely a century old. In fact, having assumed such superiority, it becomes more than acceptable for us to bulldoze nature and native societies. To do so actually becomes desirable, inevitable, and possibly "divine."

But the assertion that technological society is something higher than what came before, and that it is bound to bring us a better world, has lately fallen open to grave doubts. The Industrial Revolution is about a century old, and we have had ample time to draw a few conclusions about how it is going. It is not too soon to observe that this revolution may not be living up to its advertising, at least in terms of human contentment, fulfilment, health, sanity, and peace. And it is surely creating terrible and possibly catastrophic impacts on the earth. Technotopia seems already to have failed, but meanwhile it continues to lurch forward, expanding its reach and becoming more arrogant and dangerous.

The next questions become: Can we expect the situation to improve or worsen in the future? And what of the people who always told us that this way would not work, and continue to say so now? Finally, which is the more "romantic" viewpoint: that technology will fix itself and lead us to paradise, or that the answer is something simpler?

Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, Sierra Club Books, (1992) p2-7.

COMMMENT: The following texts trace the 20th century questioning of the necessity "to bulldoze nature and native societies" in the name of technological progress.

 

In the Absence of the Sacred Part 2

Jerry Mander

The second book was to be a kind of continuation and update of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. That book impressed me tremendously when I read it twenty years ago. In one sense it was a masterful work, detailing in excruciating fashion U.S. double-dealing and brutality against the Indians. But in another sense Brown did the Indian cause a disservice by seeming to suggest that they were all wiped out, and that now there is nothing to be done. The book put the reader through an emotional catharsis; having read it, it was as if one had already paid one's dues. Combined with the popular imagery from television and films, the book helped remand Indian issues to the past.

Even liberal-minded people, concerned about issues of justice, who acknowledge the atrocities committed on this land, tend to speak of Indian issues as tragedies of the distant past. So ingrained is this position that when, occasionally, non-Indians do come forward on behalf of present-day Indian causes - Marlon Brando, William Kunstler, Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Jane Fonda - they are all put into that "romantic" category. People are a bit embarrassed for them, as if they'd stepped over some boundary of propriety. When environmentalists such as David Brower occasionally speak publicly about how we should heed the philosophies of the Inuit (Eskimos), they are thought impractical, uncool, not politic, not team players. (And when a specific issue pits native traditions against some current environmental concern, such as fur trapping, or subsistence sealing, or whaling, the native viewpoint is not given a fair hearing.) Literary luminaries like Peter Matthiessen have also been chastised for books on contemporary Indian issues (In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and Indian Country), with the implication that they should return to novels and Zen explorations.

I have had my own experiences with this. In Four Arguments I reported several encounters with Indians as a way of revealing bias in the media. I was surprised at the number of critics who cited those lines as foolish. Gene Youngblood, for example, a respected radical writer on media issues, said, "Mander is so naive. . . . My God, that old sixties chestnut, the Indians."

I thought that even Nelson Mandela got that treatment when he spoke about Indians at his 1990 Oakland rally. The news reports seemed to suggest that he didn't quite understand "our Indians."

The Indian issue is not part of the distant past. Many of the worst anti - Indian campaigns were undertaken scarcely 80 to 100 years ago. Your great-grandparents were already alive at the time. The Model-T Ford was on the road.

More to the point is that the assaults continue today. While the Custer period of direct military action against Indians may be over in the United States, more subtle though equally devastating "legalistic" manipulations continue to separate Indians from their land and their sovereignly, as we will see from the horrible events in Alaska, described in Chapter 16.

There are still over one and a half million Indians in the United States today. Significant numbers of them continue to live in wilderness and desert regions and in the far north of Alaska, often engaging in traditional subsistence practices on the same lands where their ancestors lived for millennia. Contrary to popular assumptions, most of these Indians are not eager to become Americans, despite the economic, cultural, and legal pressures to do so.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of native peoples also live in a traditional manner, while suffering varying degrees of impact from the expansion of Western technological society. In places such as Indonesia, Borneo, New Guinea, the Amazon forests, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, parts of central Africa, the north of Canada, and even Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, China, and Tibet, tribal peoples are struggling to defend their ancestral lands. In other places, such as India, Iraq, Turkey, Mexico, Chile, the Pacific islands, New Zealand, and Australia, millions more native peoples live a kind of in-between existence, while they are under cultural, economic, or military siege.

According to Cultural Survival, the Boston-based human rights organization, there are at least 3,000 native nations in the world today that continue to function within the boundaries of the 200-odd countries that assert sovereignty over them. Many wars that our media describe as "civil wars" or "guerrilla insurgencies" are actually attempts by tribal nations to free themselves of the domination of larger nation-states. In Guatemala, it's the Mayans. In Burma, it's the Karens. In the Amazon, it's the Yanomamo and the Xingu, among others. In Micronesia, it's the Belauans. In Indonesia, it's the peoples of Irian Jaya.

Perhaps the most painful realization for Americans is that in many of these foreign locales - particularly South America, the Pacific islands, Indonesia, and the Philippines - the natives' struggles to maintain their lands and sovereignty is often directed against United States corporations, or technology, or military. More to the point, it is directed against a mentality, and an approach to the planet and to the human place on Earth, that native people find fatally flawed. For all the centuries they've been in contact with us, they've been saying that our outlook is missing something. But we have ignored what they say. To have heeded them would have meant stopping what we were doing and seeking another path. It is this very difference in world views that has made the assault on Indian people inevitable.

    Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, Sierra Club Books, (1992) p2-7.

COMMENT: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is emotionally draining, yet it demands to be studied alongside accounts of the fate of indigenous peoples today, such as those by Jay Griffiths.

In the Absence of the Sacred Part 1

 Extracts from In the Absence of the Sacred, by Jerry Mander

Originally I planned to write two books. The first was to be a critique of technological society as we know it in the United States, a kind of sequel to Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Instead of concentrating on TV, though, it would have focused on the new technological age: "the information, society," computerization, robotization, space travel, artificial intelligence, genetics, satellite communications. This seemed timely, since these technologies are changing our world at an astoundingly accelerating rate. Thus far, most people view these changes as good. But are they?

That our society would tend to view new technologies favorably is understandable. The first waves of news concerning any technical innovation are invariably positive and optimistic. That's because, in our society, the information is purveyed by those who stand to gain from our acceptance of it: corporations and their retainers in the government and scientific communities. None is motivated to report the negative sides of new technologies, so the public gets its first insights and expectations from sources that are clearly biased.

Over time, as successive generations of idealized technical innovations are introduced and presented at World's Fairs, in futurists' visions, and in hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of advertising, we develop expectations of a technological utopia here on Earth and in great domed cities in space. We begin to equate technological evolution with evolution itself, as though the two were equally inevitable, and virtually identical. The operating homilies become "Progress is good," "There's no turning back," and "Technology will free humans from disease, strife, and unremitting toil."

Debate on these subjects is inhibited by the fact that views of technology in our society are nearly identical across the political and social spectrum. The Left takes the same view of technology as do corporations, futurists, and the Right. Technology, they all say, is neutral. It has no inherent' politics, no inevitable social or environmental consequences. What matters, according to this view, is who controls technology.

I have attended dozens of conferences in the last ten years on the future of technology. At every one, whether sponsored by government, industry, or environmentalists or other activists, someone will address the assembly with something like this: "There are many problems with technology and we need to acknowledge them, but the problems are not rooted to the technologies themselves. They are caused by the way we have chosen to use them. We can do better. We must do better. Machines don't cause problems, people do." This is always said as if it were an original and profound idea, when actually everyone else is saying exactly the same thing.

As we will see, the idea that technology is neutral is itself not neutral - it directly serves the interests of the people who benefit from our inability to see where the juggernaut is headed.

I only began to glimpse the problem during the 1960s when I saw how excited our society became about the presumed potentials of television. Activists, like everyone else, saw the technology opportunistically, and began to vie with other segments of society for their twenty seconds on the network news. A kind of war developed for access to this powerful new instrument that spoke pictures into the brains of the whole population, but the outcome was predetermined. We should have realized it was a foregone conclusion that TV technology would inevitably be controlled by corporations, the government, and the military. Because of the technology's geographic scale, its cost, the astounding power of its imagery, and its ability to homogenize thought, behavior, and culture, large corporations found television uniquely efficient for ingraining a way of life that served (and still serves) their interests. And in times of national crisis, the government and military find TV a perfect instrument for the centralized control of information and consciousness. Meanwhile, all other contenders for control of the medium have effectively fallen by the wayside.

Now we have the frenzy over computers, which, in theory, can empower individuals and small groups and produce a new information democracy. In fact, as we will see in Chapter 4, the issue of who benefits most from computers was already settled when they were invented. Computers, like television, are far more valuable and helpful to the military, to multinational corporations, to international banking, to governments, and to institutions of surveillance and control - all of whom use this technology on a scale and with a speed that are beyond our imaginings - than they ever will be to you and me.

Computers have made it possible to instantaneously move staggering amounts of capital, information, and equipment throughout the world, giving unprecedented power to the largest institutions on the earth. In fact, computers make these institutions possible. Meanwhile, we use our personal computers to edit our copy and hook into our information networks - and believe that makes us more powerful.

Even environmentalists have contributed to the problem by failing to effectively criticize technical evolution despite its obvious, growing, and inherent bias against nature. I fear that the ultimate direction of technology will become vividly clear to us only after we have popped out of the "information age" - which does have a kind of benevolent ring - and realize what is at stake in the last two big "wilderness intervention" battlegrounds: space and the genetic structures of living creatures. From there, it's on to the "postbiological age" of nanotechnology and robotics, whose advocates don't even pretend to care about the natural world. They think it's silly and out of date.

This first book was intended to raise questions about whether technological society has lived up to its advertising, and also to address some grave concerns about its future direction. Until now we have been impotent in the face of the juggernaut, partly because we are so unpracticed in technological criticism. We don't really know how to assess new or existing technologies. It is apparent that we need a new, more holistic language for examining technology, one that would ignore the advertised claims, best-case visions, and glamorous imagery that inundate us and systematically judge technology from alternative perspectives: social, political, economic, spiritual, ecological, biological, military. Who gains? Who loses? Do the new technologies serve planetary destruction or stability? What are their health effects? Psychological effects? How do they affect our interaction with and appreciation of nature? How do they interlock with existing technologies? What do they make possible that could not exist before? What is being lost? Where is it all going? Do we want that?

In the end, we can see that technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative implications.

Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, Sierra Club Books, (1992) p2-7

COMMENT: This new series of Blogs is offered for discussion within and between households, in schools and colleges, in local groups of national and international societies, in community and faith centres of all persuasions. The first two were published in 1992, the third in 1945, is followed by three pieces fro 1925. All are concerned with the relentless surge of technological power over the political, economic and spiritual/social spheres of World Society.

Comments welcome.