Loss of Value in the Life of Humans Paper

Books by Lewis Mumford TI1E STORY OF UTOPIAS 1922 STICKS AND STONES 1924 ‘fflE GOLDEN DAY 1926 HERMAN MELVIll.E 1929 TIIE BROWN DECADES 1931 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION 1934 Technics and· Civilization LEWIS MUMFORD THE CULTURE OF CITIES 1938 MEN MUST ACT 1939 FAITH FOR LIVING 1940 ‘fflE soum IN ARCHITECTURE 1941 ‘fflE CONDITION OF MAN 1944 CITY DEVEI.OPMENT 1945 ·VAWESFOR SURVIVAL 1946 GREEN MEMORIES 1947 ‘fflE CONDUCTOFUF’E 1951 ART AND TECHNICS 1952 IN TIIE NAME OF SANITY 1954 FROM ‘fflE GROUND UP 1956 TIIE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN 1956 ‘fflE HUMAN WAY OUT 1958 ‘fflE CITY IN HISTORY 1961 ‘fflE HIGHWAY AND TIIE CITY 1963 ‘fflE URBAN PROSPECT 1968 TIIE MY’ffl OF ‘fflE MACHINE: I. TECHNICS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1,967 II. ‘fflE PENTAGON OF POWER 1970 ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 1972 INTERPRETATIONS AND FORECASTS 1973 FINDINGS AND KEEPINGS 1975 MY WORKS AND DAYS 1979 TIIE LEWIS MUMFORD READER 1986 A Harvest Book Harcourt Brace & Company San Diego New York London

During the last century the automatic or semi-automatic machine has come to occupy a large place in our daily routine; and we have tended to attribute to the physical instrument itself the whole com· plex of habits and methods that created it and accompanied it. Almost every discussion of technology from Marx onward has tended to overemphasize the part played by the more mobile and active parts of our industrial equipment, and has slighted other equally critical elements in our technical heritage. What is a machine? Apart from the simple machines of classic mechanics, the inclined plane, the pulley, and so forth, the subject remains a confused one. Many of the writers who have discussed the machine age have treated the machine as if it were a very recent phenomenon, and as if the technology of handicraft had employed only tools to transform the environment. These preconceptions are baseless. For the last three thousand years, at least, machines have been an essential part of our older technical heritage. Loss of Value in the Life of Humans Paper

.

Reuleaux’s definition of a machine has remained a classic: “A machine is a com­ bination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinant motions”; but it does not take us very far. Its place is due to his importance as the first great morphologist of machines, for it leaves out the large class of ma­ chines operated by man-power. Machines have developed out of a complex of non-organic agents for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a mensurable order and regularity the processes of life. The automaton is the last step in a process that began with the use of one part or another of the human body as a tool. In back of the development of tools and �achines lies the attempt to modify the environment in such a way as to fortify and sustain the human organism: the effort is either to extend the powers of the otherwise unarmed organism, or to manufacture outside of the body a set of conditions more favorable toward maintaining its equilibrium and ensuring its survival. Instead of a physiological adaptation to the cold, like the growth of hair or the habit of hibernation, there is an environmental adaptation, such as that made possible by the use of clothes and the erection of shelters.

The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator: the tool lends itself to manipulation, the • machine to automatic action. The degree of complexity is unimpor­ tant: for, using the tool, the human hand and eye perform compli, cated actions which are the equivalent, in function, of a well de­ veloped machine; while, on the other hand, there are highly effec­ tive machines, like the drop hammer, which do very simple tasks, with the aid of a relatively simple mechanism. The difference be­ tween tools and machines lies primarily in the degree of automatism they have reached: the skilled tool-user becomes more accurate and more automatic, in short, more mechanical, as his originally volun­ tary motions settle down into reflexes, and on the other hand, even in the most completely automatic machine, there must intervene some­ where, at the beginning and the end of the process, first in the original design, and finally in the ability to overcome defects and to make repairs, the conscious participation of a human agent. Moreover, between the tool and the machine there stands another class of objects, the machine-tool: here, in the lathe or the drill, one has the accuracy of the finest machine coupled with the skilled at­ tendance of the workman. When one adds to this mechanical complex an external source o� power, the line of division becomes even more difficult to establish. In general, the machine emphasizes specialization of function, whereas the tool indicates flexibility: a planing machine performs only one operation, whereas a knife can be used to smooth wood, to carve it, to split it, or to pry open a lock, or to drive in a screw. Loss of Value in the Life of Humans Paper

The automatic machine, then, is a very specialized kind of adaptation; it involves the notion of an external source of power, a more or less complicated inter-relation of parts, and a limited kind of activity. From the beginning the machine was a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions. Along with these dynamic elements in technology there is another set, more static in character, but equally important in function. While the growth of machines is the most patent technical fact of the last thousand years, the machine, in the form of the fire-drill or the potter’s wheel, has been in existence since at least neolithic times. During the earlier period, some of the most effective adaptations of the environment came, not from the invention of machines, but from the equally admirable invention of utensils, apparatus, and utilities. The basket and the pot stand for the first, the dye vat and the brick­ kiln stand for the second, and reservoirs and aqueducts and roads and buildings belong to the third class. The modern period has finally given us the power utility, like the railroad track or the electric transmission line, which functions only through the operation of power machinery. While tools and machines transform the environ­ ment by changing the shape and location of objects, utensils and apparatus have been used to effect equally necessary chemical trans­ formations. Tanning, brewing, distilling, dyeing have been as impor­ tant in man’s technical development as smithing or weaving. But most of these processes remained in their traditional state till the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is only since then that they have been influenced in any large degree by the same set of scientific forces and human interests that were developing the modern power­ machine. In the series of objects from utensils to utilities there is the same relation between the workman and the process that one notes in the series between tools and automatic machines: differences in the degree of specialization, the degree of impersonality. But since people’s attention is directed most easily to the noisier and more { 12 TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION CULTURAL PREPARATION active parts of the environment, the role of the utility and the appa· ratus has been neglected in most discussions of the machine, or, what is almost as bad, these technical instruments have all been clumsily grouped as machines. The point to remember is that both have played an enormoiis· part in the development of the modern environment; and at no stage in history can the two means of adapta­ tion be split apart. Every technological complex includes both: not least our modern one. When I use the word machines hereafter I shall refer to specific objects like the printing press or the power loom. When I use the term “the machine” I shall employ it as a shorthand reference to the entire technological complex. This will embrace the knowledge and skills and arts derived from industry or implicated in the new technics, and will include various forms of tool, instrument, apparatus and utility as well as machines proper. lead taken by Salerno in the scientific and medical advances of the W Middle Age. It was, however, in the monasteries of the est that the desire for order and power, other than that expressed in the mili­ tary domination of weaker men, first manifested itself after the long uncertainty and bloody confusion that attended the breakdown of the Roman Empire. Within the walls of the monastery was sanctuary: under the rule of the order surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay. Opposed to the erratic fluctuations and pulsations of the worldly life was the iron discipline of the rule.

Benedict added a seventh period to the devotions of the d�y, and in the seventh century, by a bull of Pope Sabinianus, it was decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours. These punctuation marks in the day were known as the canoni· cal hours, and some means of keeping count of them and ensuring their regular repetition became·necessary. According to a now discredited legend, the first modern mechanical clock. worked by falling weights. was invented by the monk named Gerbert who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II near the close of the tenth century. This clock was probably only a water clock, one of those bequests of the ancient world either left over directly from the days of the Romans, like the water-wheel itself, or corning back again into the West through the Arabs. But the legend, as so often happens, is accurate in its implications if not in its facts. The monastery was the seat of a regular life, and an instrument for striking the hours at intervals or for reminding the bell-ringer that it was time to strike the bells, was an almost inevitable product of this life. If the mechanical clock did not appear until the cities of the thirteenth century demanded an orderly routine, the habit of order itself and the earnest regulation of time-sequences had become almost second nature in the monastery. Coulton agrees with Sombart in looking upon the Benedictines, the great working order, as perhaps the original founders of modem capitalism: their rule certainly took the curse off work and their vigorous engineering enterprises may even have robbed wadare of some of its glamor. So one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries-at one time there were 40,000 under the Benedictine rule–helped to give human 2: The Monastery and the Clock ‘ 1\ ( ‘) � l, : 1 Loss of Value in the Life of Humans Paper

Where did the machine first take form in modem civilization? There was. plainly more than one point of origin. Our mechanical civilization represents the convergence of numerous habits, ideas, and modes of living, as well as technical instruments; and some of these were, in the beginning, directly opposed to the civilization they helped to create. But the first manifestation of the new order took place in the general picture of the world: during the first seven centuries of the machine’s existence the categories of time and space underwent an extraordinary change, and no aspect of life was left untouched by this transformation. The application of quantitative methods of thought to the study of nature had its first manifestation in the regular measurement of time; and the new mechanical conception o£ �ime arose in part out of the routine of the monastery. W Alfred h1tehead has ernphasized the importance of the scholastic belief in a universe ordered by God as one of the foundations of modern physics: but behind that belief was the presence of order in the institutions of the Church itself. The technics of the ancient world were still carried on from Constantinople and Baghdad to Sicily and Cordova: hence the early .. Ill “l. (‘ ll\ f1 H TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION enterprise the regular collective heat and rhythm of the machine; for t he clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, hut of synchronizing the actions of men. Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men’s minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. At all events, by the thirteenth century there are definite records of mechanical clocks, and by 1370 a well-designed “modern” clock had been built by Heinrich von Wyck at Paris. Meanwhile, hell towers had come into existence, and the new clocks, if they did not have, till the fourteenth century, a dial and a hand that translated the movement of time into a movement through space, at all events struck the hours. The clouds that could paralyze the sundial, the freezing that could stop the water clock on a winter night, were no longer obstacles to time-keeping: summervor winter, day or night, one was aware of the measured clank of the clock. The instrument presently spread outside the monastery; and the regular striking of the hells brought a new regularity into the life of the workman and the merchant. The hells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence. Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions. The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is h oth the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous. Loss of Value in the Life of Humans Paper

Here, at the very beginning of modem technics, appeared prophetically the accurate automatic machine which, only after centuries of further effort, was also to prove the final consummation of this technics in every department of industrial activity. There had been power-machines, such as the water-mill, before the clock; and there had also been various kinds of automata, to awaken the wonder of the populace in the temple, or to please the idle fancy of some Moslem caliph: machines one finds illustrated in Hero and Al-Jazari. But here was a new kind of CULTURAL PREPARATION 15 power-machine, in which the source of power and the transmission were of such a nature as to ensure the even flow of energy throughout the works and to make possible regular production and a stand–· ardized product. In its relationship to determinable quantities of· energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the fore­ most machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire. The clock, moreover, served as a model for many other kinds of mechanical works, and the analysis of motion thai accompanied the perfection of the clock, with the various types of gearing and transmission that were elaborated, contributed to the success of quite different kinds of machine. Smiths could have hammered thou­ sands of suits of armor or thousands of iron cannon, wheelwrights could have shaped thousands of great water-wheels or crude gears, without inventing any of the special types of movement developed in clockwork, and without any of the accuracy of measurement and fineness of articulation that finally produced the accurate eighteenth century chronometer. The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose “prod­ uct” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an inde­ pendent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, hut a slight journey from East to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign : while human life has regularities of its own, the heat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change fr�m hour to hour with mood and action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not by the calendar hut by the events that occupy it. The shepherd meas­ ures from the time the ewes lambed; the farmer measures hack to the day of sowing or forward to the harvest: if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathe�ati�lly isolate? ��· organic time–what Bergson calls durat10n-1s cumulative m its \ effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense, ·be speeded up or run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images of a moving picture, organic time m�ves in only one direction-through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death-and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to he horn. Around 1345, according to Thorndike, the division of hours into sixty minutes and of minutes into sixty seconds became common: it was this abstract framework of divide Purchase answer to see full attachment