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.