Technics and Civilization - Review

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came to this book from Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, curious about what he had to say about clocks and their effect on behavior. I envisioned it as a short tract, instead what I found was a glorious 450+ page in-depth philosophical examination the modern relationship of culture and the industrial machine as well as the historical events and trends that all had to converge to get to the dominance of technocratic thinking in our society at the time. I wish I had the depth of background to do a review of this book justice, but I don't, so instead I'll just mention some of the elements and ideas I found within that really appealed to me.

In retrospect Mumford seems like kind of a tragic radical. Alarmed at the direction society was heading with machines in our culture, he put a lot of time into identifying how we got here (here in 1934), and why we should change course and how we should do it. His argument is cogent, his prose is fluid and highly readable for such dense material, and his suggestions were taken up by virtually nobody. At least, nobody who controlled resources and the machines that managed and processed them. What strikes me most is his passion for a humanist society, that placed human happiness first, and wealth and efficiency second. Over and over he returns to the idea that we simply don't have to put machines (and by proxy the men who own them) first, we can put people first, and he comes at that idea from many different directions.

The man himself seems highly educated, well-read and incredibly intelligent, and indeed many of the things he advocates were well ahead of his time and frequently still relevant today, although partly because many of the real problems he addresses were never really adequately addressed.

Among his solutions to a society losing it's humanity to machine-centric thinking, are the following (some more practical than others):

1) Wind, Solar and Nuclear Energy. In 1934! Although, amusingly, he seems to doubt that atomic energy can ever really be exploited in any useable form.

2) He makes a strong case for public ownership of coal, oil and farmland. His reasoning being public resources vital to our survival should not be left to the vagaries of capitalism.

3) He advocates for a universal income, with the same arguments still used to advocate for universal income today.

4) Is almost amusingly casual in commenting that the political changes necessary for any of the ideas he advocates would be a revolution, the bloodlessness of such resting on the moral character of the revolutionaries.

Among his many thoughts and ideas about our relation to machine technology are the following (which I found helpful and thought-provoking):

1) Workers who are treated like cogs in a machine, who are stuck in jobs that are dehumanizing and soul-crushingly repetitive, will "loaf" and work as little as they can get away with and that should be understood as the natural human reaction to putting a human in an inhospitable environment.

2) There are aspects of life machines and industry are not able to address because they lie outside the purview of those things. This seems a silly thing to say out loud because it seems so obvious, but I believe it's something that could be said more often today. A modern way to say this would be something like, "There are aspects of life and human happiness that no cell-phone app or gadget you can buy will ever be able to help someone with."

3) He basically calls bullshit on the entire culture of production, advertising and identity consumerism. He call for a normalization of consumption, where over-consumption of goods would be perceived negatively, and where uniqueness and identity are broadcast through personality, not with consumer goods a substitute for personality.

4) He points out that labor-saving devices only reduce labor if we do not increase how much we consume and suggest that maybe if we didn't consume a bunch of pointless, mass-produced cheaply made and unnecessary goods, we might actually be able to work things like a 2-day work week. He suggests saving labor, only to labor more to consume more is ultimately not going to make us happy. 80 years later I'm not sure he's wrong.

5) A device or a product or a machine should only be used when it has a use appropriate to the specific moment and put down when no longer needed. Which again, seems obvious, but may still be good advice to the average cell-phone user.

There is so much more that I want to write about this book, but it would require more of me than I have to give to articulate every line of thought inspired in the reading. Perhaps in the next read-through. Quirks aside, I find Mumford a brilliant writer, with me exclaiming and highlighting nearly every chapter. If you're interested at all in the relationship between our society and technics, this is definitely one to add to your list.



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