Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 29 (Lewis Mumford)

“Tool-Users vs. Homo Sapiens and The Megamachine” (1966)

Background Info:

·         American historian and philosopher of technology and science (1895-1990).

·         Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, had a broad career as a writer and an influential literary critic.

·         influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederic J. Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.

·         In his early writings on urban life, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote that the human race would use electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind. He would later take a more pessimistic stance. His early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Reading Response:
Rather than technology, Mumford concentrates on the term technics (from Greek tekhne) and man’s “work.” He sees technology as part of technics. Technics is uniquely human in that it moves beyond the mere hand’s tool-making to the brain, modifying tools with “linguistic symbols, esthetic designs, and socially transmitted knowledge” (345). In other words, man is not a mere tool-making animal, but a social/cultural being with personality, and this includes even primitive man. The mind controls all of man, not just his hands. Mumford goes one step further to suggest that man’s work has always been less about practical needs (such as control over the environment for food supply) and more about aspirations and symbolic culture.

Mumford believes that the evolution of language was more influential to further human development than any other “tool-making.” To Mumford, overlooking the evolution of language is to “overlook the main chapters of history” (347). Yet in the modern age, Mumford sees technics as disassociating from the larger cultural whole. Technics was “broadly life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered” (347). But once this was established, technics increased the potential for human expression. Spoken language gave man power.

According to Mumford, over 5,000 years ago, “monotechnics” (the real Machine Age) came into existence (348). Monotechnics brought about the first “megamachines”—complex, high-powered, collective machines, and it is a result of their invention that technics became disassociated from “other biological and social activities”  (348), engrossing man’s entire lifetime. This idea of “work” became a curse, according to Mumford, until the invention of the clock in the 14th c. He gives examples of engineering feats—the pyramids—as proof of these new technics. And even though these machines were defective and misused (causing destruction—destroyed cities, poisoned soils, and violence), the collective security and abundance they afforded man outweighed this cost (his comparison of a modern space shuttle with an Egyptian pyramid was particularly striking for me—both are means for reaching the cosmos.) But these costs are tolerable in that the megamachine brings benefits to the community by increasing human effort and aspiration. The orderly, ritualized, repetitive work of the megamachine brought with it a means of self-control , and this unconditional commitment to the megamachine is now regarded as the purpose of human existence, as a result of continued scientific and technical advancements.

Yet the megamachine has a weakness:  it is pre-scientific, nonrational, an agent of arrest and regression. To Mumford, our ability to see this weakness could move technics back into the service of human development (rather than service to the machine). Mumford believes we must redefine work to include “educative, mind-forming, self-rewarding,” voluntary work in our technology-centered lives.