Book Review
“The Myth of the Machine”
by Doresa Banning
September 19, 2001
Mumford says modern man has formed a distorted picture of himself, by interpreting his early history in terms of his present interests in making machines and conquering nature. Modern man calls himself a prehistoric tool-making animal.
Mumford disagrees. He argues that man’s brain was from the beginning more important than his hands, and that ritual, language and social organization were probably man’s most important artifacts from the earliest stages on. From this he flourished, not from his command of tools. His command of tools could not have come without his mastery of language.
In the book Mumford explains the forces that have shaped technology from prehistoric times on. That explanation contains his view of how humans developed.
He shows that rather than the modern machine being the central fact of human life today, man himself has from the beginning been and still is the central fact.
The evolution
The first mission of human culture was for man to learn to be human, establish an identifiable personality out of a wide variety of animal propensities. He transformed himself long before he tried to master his physical environment.
This required the emergence of mind, the most radical step in man’s evolution. Where the brain is a biological organ, the mind is an organizing center, from which culture emerges.Man became aware, conscious of himself -- the main justification for all the suffering and misery that have accompanied human development.
“Meaning lives and dies with man, or rather, with the creative process that brought him into existence and gave him a mind.”
Man’s first concern was to utilize his nervous system and give form to a human self by the fabrication of symbols the only tools his body could construct: dreams, images and sounds.
Dreams allowed man to leave the restrictions of a purely animal lifestyle. “Creativity begins in the unconscious; and its first human manifestation is the dream. “. . . it was the dream that opened man’s eyes to new possibilities in his waking life.”
Man was driven to give orderly sequence and pattern to his daily activities.
Gestures, actions, bodily movements created meaning and led to ritual. This “technology of the body” was the earliest form of any kind of technical order and earliest manifestation of expressive and communicable meaning. Ritual promoted a social solidarity.
The taboo emerged, which ensured the practice of self-control and self-discipline, which were fundamental to human development.
Language emerged. “No complex machine that has yet been made approaches the uniformity, the variety, the adaptability, the efficiency of language. Language, far more than tools, established human identity.”
Gesture and bodily exercise led to dance and song, and from song to speech. “Man’s acquisition of speech proved his greatest leap upward into a fully human state. It probably required more time and effort than any other phase of human culture.”“The invention and perfection of these instruments rituals, symbols, words, images, mores were the principal occupation of early man, more necessary to survival than tool-making and far more essential to his later development.”
Now equipped with speech, man moved to domestication and creation of village culture, which was based on communion, communication and cooperation.
Then a new set of institutions civilizations sprang up, which were under the control of a dominant minority (authoritarian) and featured a social pyramid. “This political structure was the basic invention of the new age: without it, neither its monuments nor its cities could have been built, nor, one must add, would their premature destruction have so persistently taken place.”
The leaders of these civilizations contributed to society the “invention of the archetypal machine,” or “the earliest working model for all later complex machines.”
“. . . when utilized to perform work on highly organized collective enterprises, I shall call it the ‘labor machine’; when applied to acts of collective coercion and destruction, it deserves the title, even used today, the ‘military machine.’ But when all the components, political and economic, military, bureaucratic and royal, must be included, I shall usually refer to the ‘megamachine.’ The technical equipment derived from a megamachine becomes “megatechnics.’
Machine = mechanized men
Megamachines were made up of humans. These highly refined megamachines featured groups of men under the control of someone in charge. They required submission, faith and obedience to the leader. They needed a bureaucracy to work. Only those in charge benefited. Megamachines were labor-using devices, rather than today’s labor-saving machines. “Instead of freeing labor, the royal megamachine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it. These human machines were by nature large and impersonal, if not deliberately dehumanized.”
“Now to call these collective entities machines is no idle play on words. If a machine be defined, more or less in accord with the classic definition of Franz Reuleaux, as a combination of resistant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control, to utilize energy and to perform work, then the great labor machine was in every aspect a genuine machine: all the more because its components, though made of human bone, nerve, and muscle, were reduced to their bare mechanical elements and rigidly standardized for the performance of their limited tasks.”
The invention of writing helped make the megamachine operative by way of instructions and accountability.
The megamachine reached its highest peak of performance in the Pyramid Age.
Good contributions of the megamachine: communal pride, urban v. village life, code of law and order, confidence in human powers, heightened sense of human possibility.
“From the outset all the blessings of mechanized production have been undermined by the process of mass destruction which the megamachine made possible.”The one lasting contribution of the megamachine was the myth of the machine itself.Myth of the machine: “the notion that this machine was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent.”
Bad contributions of the megamachine: threats, raids, slave capture, war, loss of sense of reality on part of leaders, psychologically unhealthy people, vast collective eruptions of hate, blasted landscapes, befouled streams, polluted air, congested filthy slums, epidemics of avoidable disease, the ruthless extirpation of old crafts, destruction of valuable monuments of architecture and historyThe human machine mocks the infantile fantasy of absolute power. “With every increase of effective power, extravagantly sadistic and murderous impulses erupted out of the unconscious. The cult of power, from the beginning, was based upon a gross fallacy. Ultimately the end product proved as life-defeating for the master classes as the mechanism itself was for the disinherited and socially dismembered workers and slaves.”
“The greatest threat to the efficiency of the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose. The strongest and most efficient of the megamachines can be overthrown. . .”
Uprisings, rebellion, revolution and resistance ensued. Leaders and their agents regressed to a simian level. They had alienated themselves from their distinctly human potentialities. The real gains in power and wealth led to a dead end: they produced no equivalent wealth of mind.
Then a new set of values sprung up out of revolt against all the pomp and vanities of worldly success gigantic images, imposing buildings, gluttonous feasts, promiscuous sexuality, human sacrifices all that degraded humanity and shriveled the spirit. These new figures persuaded rather than commanded; they did not seek to be rulers but teachers.
The source of power for the megamachine was disconnected and abandoned; and this reform hastened the pace of inventing alternative non-human power systems and machines a positive advance.
For example, monks began to introduce labor-saving machines so they’d have time for more prayer.
“But the process of moralizing work and integrating it with every other human activity wasn’t fully accomplished. Instead, the forces specializing in power absolutism, militarism and capitalism re-emerged, laying the basis for a dehumanized technology, and in the end for something that provided even more fateful, a new myth of the machine.”
“Capitalism exploited and universalized a powerful positive motivation that, for human reasons, had never been tapped in more primitive societies. Money, as the nexus in all human relations and as the main motivation in all social effort, replaced the reciprocal obligations and duties of families, neighbors, citizens and friends. Money was the only form of power, which . . . knew no limits.
The old myth of unlimited power had begun to stir again in the modern mind, and the megamachine was resurrected, this time, however, with non-human parts replacing the recalcitrant and uncertain human components. From the 16th century on, the secret of the megamachine was slowly rediscovered.
“The expansion of the megamachine its kingdom, its power, its glory became progressively the chief end, or at least the fixed obsession, of Western man. Advanced thinkers began to hold that the new machine could give meaning to human existence the new myth of the machine, according to Mumford.
“And if our descendants reduce this planet to such a denatured state as the bulldozer, the chemical exterminators, and the nuclear bombs and reactors are already doing, then man himself will become equally denatured, that is to say, dehumanized.” He will become passive, purposeless and machine-controlled.