John Michael Greer -- The Archdruid Report
Jan. 24, 2007 -- Lewis Mumford’s 1934 opus Technics and Civilization was one of the first major efforts to take technology seriously as a defining factor in human culture, and it still remains one of the better attempts at a broad vision of technology’s impact on civilization, light-years ahead of Marshall McLuhan’s glib generalizations, or the dualistic morality plays of such current figures as John Zerzan. History has dealt harshly with Mumford’s more optimistic predictions, and the history of the next century or so will likely be even less merciful. Mumford was very much a thinker of his own time, a firm believer in the inevitability and moral value of progress, and the thought that the technological civilization of his own time might turn out to be the peak of a ballistic arc was, at least in 1934, unthinkable to him. Still, a writer who in 1934 could argue that the future belonged to sustainability rather than linear progress, and identified the restoration of balance between humanity and organic nature as a central need of his time, is hardly outdated today.
Mumford’s view of the rise of modern technics divides the process into three steps. The first step -- the eotechnic phase (from Greek eos, dawn, and techne, craft) -- unfolded from older handcraft traditions reshaped by advances in mathematics and pre-Newtonian physics. The technologies that typify the phase -- clocks, windmills, printing presses, square-rigged sailing ships, firearms, and the like -- all evolved gradually out of less effective medieval versions by the gradual buildup of small incremental changes. Like their medieval equivalents, they relied on sustainable energy resources: the same combination of wind, water, biomass, and muscle that had powered human technology since the late Neolithic.
The second or paleotechnic phase (the Greek root here is paleos, old) arrived with the first efficient coal-fired steam engines. James Watt’s invention built on more than a century of earlier work, through the same sort of incremental change that turned the hand cannons of the 14th century into the flintlock rifles of the 17th; steam-powered pumps of various types had become standard in mining, where the problem of pumping water out of deep mine shafts had driven innovation since the Middle Ages. The breakthrough was as much conceptual as technical -- the vision of steam power as a prime mover for any purpose, rather than simply a mining machine, transformed society and launched the industrial revolution. Efficiencies of scale made mass production profitable as well as feasible. The sheer availability of coal, far and away the most abundant of the fossil fuels, made it almost impossible for people of the time to see the risks of a transition that made human civilization dependent on a nonrenewable resource.
It is with Mumford’s third step, the neotechnic phase (Greek neos, new, is practically an English word now), that his analysis begins to break down. In his view, the neotechnic phase is the age of electricity, and represents not a further progression along paleotechnic lines but a reversal, equal and opposite, leading to Utopia. Only the fact that a great deal of paleotechnic thinking and practice remained stuck solidly in place, he argued, kept the neotechnic phase from bringing in a new mode of society, clean, humane, decentralized and liberating.
Much of his argument makes sense even today. With electrification and the internal combustion engine, the vast centralizing force of Victorian technology went into reverse and began to encourage decentralization; electric motors allowed force to be applied at a level of delicacy steam could never achieve, and mass-produced cars replaced crowded, railroad-dependent Victorian cities with the first bloom of suburbia. In 1934, when the great hydroelectric plants of the Columbia and Tennessee watersheds were still coming on line and petroleum was so cheap to produce that even federal antitrust agencies permitted open price fixing to keep the American oil industry from bankrupting itself, the neotechnic era must have offered endless vistas of hope.
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