Prologue
The last century, we all realize, has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology. This shift has opened up such new realms as those of nuclear energy, supersonic transportation, cybernetic intelligence and instantaneous distant communication. Never since the Pyramid Age have such vast physical changes been consummated in so short a time. All these changes have, in turn, produced alterations to the human personality, while still more radical transformations, if this process continue unabated and uncorrected, loom ahead.
With this new 'megatechincs' the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planatery structure, designed for automatic opeartion. Instead of functioning actiely as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.
My purpose in this book is to question both the assumptions and the predictions upon which our commitment to the present forms of technical and scientific progress, treated as if ends in themselves, has been based...
Just because man's need for tools is so obvious, we must guard ourselves against over-stressing the role of stone tools hundreds of thousands of years before they become functionally differentiated and efficient. In treating tool-making as central to early man's survival, biologists and anthropologists for long underplayed, or neglected, a mass of activities in which many other species were for long more knowledgeable htan man. Despite evidence to the contrary, there is still a tendency to identify tools and machines with technology: to substitute the part for the whole.
If technical proficiency alone were sufficient to identify and foster intelligence, then man was for long a laggard if we take into consideration the radical innovations of other animals, with their intricate nests and bowers, their geometric beehives, their urbanoid anthills and termitaries, their beaver lodges. There was nothing uniquely human in tool-making until it was modified by linguistic symobls, esthetic designs, and socially transmitted knowledge...What is specially and uniquely human is man's capacity to combine a wide variety of animal propensities into an emergent cultural entity: a human personality.
Through man's overdeveloped and incessantly active brain, he had more mental energy to tap than he needed for survival at a purely animal level; and he was accordingly under the necessity of canalizing that energy, not just into food-getting and sexual reproduction, but into modes of living that would convert this energy more directly and constructively into appropriate cultural -- that is, symbolic -- forms. Only by creating cultural outles could he tap and control and fully utilize his own nature.
There is even reason to ask whether the standardized patterns observable in early tool-making are not in part derivable from the strictly repetitive motions of ritual, song, and dance, forms that have long existed in a state of perfection among primitive peoples, usually in far more finished style than their tools.
Only a little while ago the Dutch historian, J. Huzinga, in 'Homo Ludens' brought forth a mass of evidence to suggest that play, rather than work, was the formative element in human culture: that man's most serious activity belonged to the realm of make-believe. On this showing, ritual and mimesis, sports and games and dramas, released man from his insistent animal attachments. So certain were nineteenth-century archeologists about the primacy of stone tools and weapons in the 'struggle for existence' that when the first paleolithic cave paintings were discovered in Spain in 1879, they were denounced, out of hand, as an outrageous hoax, by 'competent authorities' on the ground that Ice Age hunters could not have had the leisure or the mind to produce the elegant art of Altamira. But mind was exactly what Homo Sapiens possessed, and I submit that at every stage man's inventions and transformations were less for the purpose of increasing the food supply or controlling nature than for utilizing his own immense organic resources and expressing his latent potentialities, in order to fulfill more adequately his superorganic demands and aspirations.
When not curbed by hostile environmental pressures, man's elaboration of symbolic culture answered a more imperative need than that for control over the environment. Besides the relatively simple coordination required for tool-using, the delicate interplay of the many organs needed for the creation of articulate speech was a far more striking advance. This effort must have occupied a greater part of early man's time, energy and mental activity, since the ultimate collective product, spoken language, was infinitely more complex and sophisticated at the dawn of civilization that the Egyptian or Mesopotamian kit of tools. To consider man, then, as primarily a tool-using animal is to overlook the main chapters of human history. Opposed to this notion, I shall develop the view that man is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activity lies first in his own organism, and in the social organization through which it finds fuller expression.
In this process of self-discovery and self-transformation, tools, in the narrow sense, served well as subsidiary instruments, but not as the main operative agent in man's development; for technics has never till our own age dissociated itself from the larger cultural whole in which man has always functioned. The classic Greek term tekhne characteristically makes no distiction between industrial production and 'fine' or symbolic art; ;and for the greater part of human history these aspects were inseparable, one side respecting the objective conditions and funcitons, the other responding to subjective needs.
The specific human achievement, which set man apart from even his nearest anthropoid relatives, was the shaping of a new self, visibily different in appearance, in behavior, and in plan of life from his primitive animal forebears. As this differentiation widened, man speeded up the process of his own evolution, achieving through culture in a relatively short span of years changes that other species accomplised laboriously through organic processes.
Henceforth, the main business of man was his own self-transformation. This self-transformation not merely rescued man from permanent fixation in his original animal condition, but freed his best-developed organ, his brain, for other tasks than those of ensuring physical survival. The dominant human trait, central to all other traits, is this capacity for conscious, purposeful self-identification, self-transformation, and ultimately for self-understanding.
In the discovery of the aboriginal field of man's inventiveness, not in his making of external tools, but primarily in th re-fashioning of his own bodily organs, I have undertaken to follow another freshly blazed trail: to examine the broad streak of irrationality that runs all through human history, counter to man's sensible, functionally rational animal inheritance. As compared even with other anthropoids, one might refer without irony of man's superior irrationality. Certainly human development exhibits a chronic disposition to error, mischief, disordered fantasy, hallucination, 'original sin', and even socially organized and sanctified misbehavior, such as the practice of human sacrifice and legalized torture. In escaping organic fixations, man forfeited the innate humility and mental stability of less adventurous species. Yet some of his most erratic departures have opened up valuable areas that purely organic evolution, over billions of years, had never explored.
The mischances that followed man's quitting mere animalhood were many, but the rewards were great. Man's proneness to mix his fantasies and projections, his desires and designs, his abstractions and his ideologies, with the commonplaces of daily experience were, we can now see, an important source of his immense creativity. There is no clean dividing line between the irrational and the super-rational; and the handling of these ambivalent gifts has always been a major human problem. One of the reasons that the current utilitarian interpretations of technics and science have been so shallow is that they ignore the fact that this aspect of human culture has been as open to both transcendental aspirations and demonic compulsions as any other part of man's existence -- and has never been so open and so vulnerable as today.
The irrational factors that have sometimes constructively promted, yet too often distorted, man's futher development became plain at the moment when the formative elements in paleolithic and neolithic cultures united in the great cultural implosion that took place around the Fourth Millennium B.C.: what is usually called 'the rise of civilization.' The remarkable fact about this transformation technically is that it was the result, not of mechanical inventions, but of a radically new type of social organiztion: a product of myth, magic, religion, and the nascent science of astronomy. This implosion of sacred political powers and technological facilities cannot be accounted for by any inventory of the tools, the simple machines, and the technical processes then available. Neither the wheeled wagon, the plow, the potter's wheel, nor the military chariot could of themselves have accomplished the mighty transformations that took place in the great valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, and eventually passed, in ripples and waves, to other parts of the planet.
The study of the Pyramid Age I made in prepartion for writing 'The City in History' unexpectedly revealed that a close parallel existed between the first authoritarian civilizations in the Near East and our own, though most of our contemporaries still regard modern technics not only as the highest point in man's intellectual development, but as an entirely new phenomenon. On the contrary, I found that what economists lately termed the Machine Age or the Power Age, had its origin, not in the so-called Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, but at the very outset in the organization of an archetypal machine composed of human parts.
Two things must be noted about this new mechanism, because they identify it throughout its historic course down to the present. The first is that the organizers of the machine derived their power and authority from a heavenly source. Cosmic order was the basis of this new human order. The exactitude in measurement, the abstract mechanical systems, the compulsive regularity of this 'megamachine', as I shall call it, sprang directly from astronomical observations and scientific calculations. The inflexible, predictable order, incorporated later in the calendar, was transferred to othe regimentation of the human components. As against earlier forms of ritualized order, this mechanised order was external to man. By a combination of divine command and ruthless military coersion, a large population was made to endure grinding poverty and forced labor at mind-dulling repetitive tasks in order to insure "Life, Prosperity, and Health" for the divine or semidivine ruler and his entourage.
The second point is that the grave social defects of the human machine were partly offset by its superb achievements in flood control and grain production, which laid the ground for an enlarged achievement in every area of human culture: in monumental art, in codified law, in systematically pursued and permanently recorded thought, in the augmentation of all the potentialities of the mind by the assemblage of a varied population, with diverse regional and vocational backgrounds in urban ceremonial centers. Such order, such collective security and abundance, such stimulating cultural mixtures were first achieved in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later iin India, China, Persia, and in the Andean and Maya cultures: and they were never surpassed until the megamachine was reconstituted in a new form in our own time. Unfortunately these cultural advances were largely offset by equally great social regressions.
Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once-autonomous human activities: 'mass culture' and 'mass control' made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar 'civilized' societies today. As for the great Egyption pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.
These colossal miscarriages of a dehumanized power-centered culture monotonously soil the pages of history from the rape of Sumer to the blasting of Warsaw and Rotterdam, Tokyo and Hiroshima. Sooner or later, this analysis suggests, we must have the courage to ask ourselves: Is this association of inordinate power and productivity and inordinate violence and destruction a purely accidental one?
In the working out of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became stragely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.
Index