A Bit More On Mumford

...from Donald L. Miller's autobiography: Lewis Mumford, A Life.

Technics and Civilization is a pioneering work in the history of technology, a book that would begin to establish Mumford as this century’s leading critic of the machine age. Along with Siegfried Giedion’s later work Mechanization Takes Command, published in America in 1948, and Abbott Payson Usher’s more narrowly focused study A History of Mechanical Inventions (1929), it created the new field of the history of technology. It is both the first full-scale study in the English language of the rise of the machine in the modern world and one of the first scholarly studies in any language to emphasize the interplay of technology and the surrounding culture. Mumford describes not simply the work of inventors and scientists but also the cultural sources and moral consequences of the breakthroughs in technology and science. He places technology squarely within the context of what he calls the social ecology.

Drawing on the latest German scholarship, Mumford analyzes the process of ideological preparation for full mechanization. Before his book appeared most English-speaking scholars placed the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, when Watt introduced his steam engine and when machine power was applied to the production of textiles. In Munich, however, Mumford discovered a challenging new literature on the history of technology that caused him to locate the origins of the machine age as far back as the Middle Ages, when a number of cultural transformations occurred that prepared the ground for the larger technical revolution that altered all of Western culture. “Men became mechanical,” in Mumford’s words, “before they perfected complicated machines to express their new bent and interest.”

The passion for order, regularity, and regimentation appeared first in the routinized world of the medieval monastery, then spread to the army and the counting-house before it finally entered the factory. In this mental transformation the clock played a crucial role. It, not the steam engine, was the most important machine of the industrial age, an interpretation now widely accepted by historians of science and technology. The mechanical clock brought a new regularity to life, for it was not merely a means of keeping track of the hours but of synchronizing human behavior. The first primitive clocks were used in monasteries to regulate the ringing of the bells, which in turn regulated the daily movements of the monks; later, to become “as regular as clockwork” became “the bourgeois ideal.” Timekeeping also became essential to an efficiently run system of production and transportation.

With the new conception of time came a closely related concern with exact measurement; together these developments led to the emergence of what Mumford calls a new scientific picture of the world. In its urge to comprehend and control the physical world, the new science, he argues, defined as “real” only those aspects of experience that were external and repeatable, that could be studied and verified by careful experimentation. Existence was separated into units that could be “weighed, measured or counted”; all else was judged “unreal.” This denial of the organic, in Mumford’s view, allowed the West to surrender to the machine, to turn inventions and mechanical contrivances that other cultures, such as the Chinese, possessed in abundance, into what he calls “the machine.” By this term he meant not only mechanical devices but a mode of life geared to the pace of high-speed technology, and committed to the technological ideals of specialization, automation, and rationality.

For Mumford, then, the emergence of the machine was fundamentally a mental revolution, a movement from organic to mechanical thinking; this is in direct contradiction to Karl Marx, who saw technology shaping values and ideas, and no the reverse. Mumford’s refusal to see the machine as a force independent of human will and purpose explains the underlying optimism of Technics and Civilization. Rejecting all forms of technological or economic determinism, he insists that human desires, decisions, and dreams influenced the course of modern invention fully as much as invention influenced modern sensibility. Our modern machine world was a creation of human effort and will, and any thoroughgoing change would first involve a change in values and social priorities. Mumford had said this before, but from this point forward this theme became the theme of his life and art.