Technics and Civilization

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Summary: Complete
Review: From the beginning of time, technology has affected our lives. Learn how every invention (from the greatest milestone of them all: the clock) through history influences society and the way we live and think.

Excellent source for everyone wanting to reflect deeply on technology.

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Summary: The First Critique of the Myth of Technology
Review: Lewis Mumford is widely regarded as a critic of architecture, but his true importance in intellectual history is as a critic of technology and the myth of progress that accompanies technology, making it seem as if every technological advance is a step forward in civilization. That the events from 1945 onward dispute this claim would seem evident, but themselves are brushed over in favor of the prevailing paradigm.

Mumford was the first to take a critical look at technology and its accompanying mythos, and even though this book was later surpassed by his masterpiece, The Myth of the Machine, it is still worth reading for its approach to the tenor of its time (written during the Depression).

You can safely ignore the last chapters when Mumford attempts to offer an alternative to the technological society. Like most critics, he is mercifully short on alternatives. (Considering what alternatives were given humanity over the centuries, you can understand why I said that.) Until we truly understand technology and the role it has taken in our lives, we will be no closer to a solution than Mumford was in the Thirties.

For anyone who wishes to study the intellectual history of the West, this is an indispensible volume.

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Summary: An Enduring Classic by an American Genius
Review: Lewis Mumford was one of America's premiere intellectual giants, a scholar of colossal erudition, a libertarian in the most profound sense, and one of the last genuine "men of letters". He developed a branch of philosophical inquiry that has since come to occupy a central place in our social consciousness. Countless scholars in the fields of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and education owe a monumental debt of gratitude to Mumford, not merely for providing them with intriguing questions to consider, but for providing them with entire careers.

Technics and Civilization is Mumford's pioneering study into the past, present, and future of technology. It is a damning indictment of Western culture and a sober reflection on the consequences of allowing ourselves to become enslaved by the product of our own design: "How in fact could the machine take possession of European society until that society had, by an inner accommodation, surrendered to the machine?" Mumford argues that the rise of technology not only changed the way society functioned, but changed the very essence of the human soul. He identifies the major technological innovations that revolutionized history and penetrated deep into the collective psyche, often to the detriment of humanity. Strangely enough, these innovations were often rooted in the most religious and ascetic dimensions of European culture. For example, the clock was the result of the almost fanatic obsession with the rigorous order that characterized daily life in medieval monasteries. Out of a holy desire to mimic the order of the cosmos, European monkery felt spiritually duty-bound to lead equally ordered lives. Everything from praying, studying, eating, sleeping, and relieving oneself was subjected to "the iron discipline of the rule". Pope Sabinianus insisted that the daily routine of the monks be kept in check by ringing monstrous bells at the appropriate times. What better way to ensure the precise timing of these bells than a mechanical device by which to accurately and reliably measure time? From the monastery, the clock was exported to every domain of society, and thus began the routinization of daily life. However, what these men of God did not realize was that the clock was thoroughly and completely foreign to human nature. Mumford contrasts "organic time", which follows the natural cycle of "birth, growth, development, decay, and death", and "mechanical time", which follows a consistent rhythm, which can be artificially set at rates that nature cannot follow, and which continues to tick after organic time has ceased to exist. In modern times, the clock has come to play such an important role in society that it is "second nature" to obey mechanical time. Mumford insightfully points out the most tragic consequence of the clock - the expression and dogmatic conviction that "time is money". The preposterous equation of time with money has led to the "increasing tempo of civilization" and to "a demand for greater power: and in turn power quickened the tempo". The result of all of this? We eat when it's time to eat, not when we are hungry. We sleep when it's time to sleep, not when we are sleepy. Even in school, children think only when its time to think. The subjugation of natural life to the "iron rule" of the clock might very well explain the psychopathic tendencies of those who cannot function in the most industrialized and "advanced" societies.

Yet, this is but one of the innumerable and brilliant insights the Mumford provides. The clock is but a metaphor for the modern age. Mumford divides technological progress into three definitive phases - Eotechnic, Paleotechnic, and Neotechnic. The division of technics into these phases gives us a framework through which to understand the defining characteristics of human civilization during each period, the rate of technological development, and a sense of where we now stand in the evolution of technology. Mumford also draws insights into organizations and their remarkably mechanical nature. The factory, the corporate office, the school, the army, the sports team, the supermarket - these systems are modeled upon the machine. To ensure seamless functionality, the machine must eliminate the domain of chance. Chance is anathema to the machine. And as the whole of society has become mechanized, our instincts yearn for something unpredictable. Hence, the obsession with sports, which provides "the glorification of chance and the unexpected". If only Mumford could have been alive to witness the debauchery of modern television…

The critical reader will forgive the book's factual shortcomings, given that it was originally written in 1934. Scholarship has since made major advances on this inquiry, albeit with the help of Mumford's groundbreaking work. The cynical reader will likely deplore what amounts to Marxist fantasies in the last few chapters. In any case, it should be pointed out that modern technics and civilization can indeed be socialized for the betterment of humanity without delving into the abysmal nightmare of Soviet-style communism. No amount of Cold War nostalgia and conservative fetishism can negate the environmental horrors and social putrefaction that are the chief products of decay by unrestrained technology. Mumford has a surprisingly positive attitude towards the potential of technology to actually improve civilization. He places strong hopes in alternative forms of energy, in socialized modes of production, in humanized work environments, and restructured economies.

Technics and Civilization is a work of history, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. It uses a long lost, multidisciplinary approach to weave together a variety of different issues and perspectives, and with the sort of scholarly authority that only Mumford can command. Consider yourself truly uneducated until you read this singular American masterpiece.

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Summary: Worth the time spent reading!
Review: Mumford has got to be one of the most over-looked (by main-stream) social critics of our time. He covers and unravels our confusing society so well, even though this book was written some time ago. Mumford's points ring quite true even in the 21st century.

Lengthy read but, for those who are serious about making sense of "why" things are they way they are here in the "civilized" world, Mumford is worth it.

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Summary: Technics and Civilization, a vital 20th Century work
Review: Mumford is widely considered the first modern person to write critically about the intricate relationship between human technology and human civilization. This book is arguably the cornerstone of the rapidly growing field of the history of technology. It is valuable because of its extensive attention to the past and its demonstration of complex links between technology, economics, society and culture. Mumford's musings about the future at the end of the book are its least important part.

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Summary: On the Good Life, or What Could Have Been
Review: Too bad Mumford wasn't a better thinker. He published everywhere and wrote on everything during a fifty-plus year career; urban planners know him best these days, but he was the New Yorker architecture critic for years and wrote on literature, culture, and politics for all the big magazines: MacCalls, Harper's, The New Republic, Seven Arts. Technics and Civilization (1934) wasn't his last book on technology; he returned to the subject again in The Pentagon of Power, two volumes, published around 1969. Technics and Civilization asks readers to consider intelligently how to better use technology to shape lives worth living, rather than to allow technology, or our use of it, to shape life unexaminedly. Mumford contributed so much to letters and to public life that we owe it to ourselves to read him, even if the limitations of his sometimes utopian ideas become too often apparent (remember, the Unabomber is a fan), because his ideas on social organizations are crack