CHAPTER FIVE
The Pretechnological Civilization of 1900
The Pretechnological Civilization of 1900
MODERN MAN EVERYWHERE takes technological civilization for granted. Even primitive people in the jungles of Borneo or in the High Andes, who may themselves still live in the Early Bronze Age and in mud huts as they have for thousands of years, need no explanation when the movie they are watching shows the flipping of a light switch, the lifting of a telephone receiver, the starting of an automobile or plane, or the launching of another satellite. In mid-twentieth century the human race has come to feel that modern technology holds the promise of conquering poverty on the earth and of conquering outer space beyond. We have learned, too, that it carries the threat of snuffing out all humanity in one huge catastrophe. Technology stands today at the very centre of human perception and human experience.
On the other hand, at the beginning of the twentieth century modern technology barely existed for the great majority of people. In terms of geography, the Industrial Revolution and its technological fruits were largely confined, in 1900, to the small minority of mankind that is of European descent and lives around the North Atlantic shores. Only Japan, of the non-European, non-Western countries, had then begun to build up a modern industry and modern technology, and in 1900 modern Japan was still in its infancy. In Indian village, Chinese town, and Persian bazaar, life was still preindustrial, still untouched by the steam engine and telegraph, and by all other new tools of the West. It was, indeed, almost an axiom—for Westerner and non-Westerner alike—that modern technology was, for better or worse, the birthright of the white man and restricted to him. This assumption underlay the imperialism of the period before World War I, and it was shared by such eminent non-Westerners as Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Nobel Prizewinning Indian poet, and Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), who, just before World War I, began his long fight for Indian independence. There was, indeed, enough apparent factual support for this belief to survive, if only as a prejudice, until World War II. Hitler, for instance, made the Japanese “honorary Aryans” and considered them “Europeans in disguise” primarily because they had mastered modern technology. And in the United States the myth lingered on in the widespread belief, before Pearl Harbor, that the Japanese, not being of European stock, were not proficient in handling such weapons of modern technology as planes or battleships.
Yet, in the West, indeed even in the most highly developed countries—England, the United States, and Germany—modern technology played in 1900 only a minor role in the lives of most people, the majority of whom were then still farmers or artisans living either in the countryside or in small towns. The tools they used and the life they led were preindustrial, and they remained unaware of the modern technology that was so rapidly growing up all around them. Only in a few large cities had modern technology imposed itself upon daily life—in the street railways, increasingly powered by electricity after 1890, and in the daily paper, dependent upon the telegraph and printed on steam-driven presses. Only there had modern technology crossed the threshold of the home with electric lights and the telephone.
Even so, to Western man in 1900, modern technology had become tremendously exciting. It was the time of the great international exhibitions in every one of which a new “miracle” of technical invention stole the show. These were also the years in which technological fiction became a best seller from Moscow to San Francisco. About 1880, books by the Frenchman Jules Verne (1828–1905), such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, became wildly popular. By 1900 the English novelist H. G. Wells (1866–1946), whose works included the technological romance The Time Machine (1893), had become more popular still. And there was virtually unbounded faith in the benevolence of technological progress. All this excitement was, however, focused on things. That these things could and would have an impact on society and on the way people behaved and thought had not occurred to many.
The advances in technology in this century are, indeed, awe-inspiring. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the foundations for most of them had been well laid by 1900, and certainly by 1910. The electric light, the telephone, the moving picture, the phonograph, and the automobile had all been invented by 1900 and were, indeed, being sold aggressively by prosperous and growing companies. And the aeroplane, the vacuum tube, and radio telegraphy were invented in the opening years of the new century.
The changes technology has wrought in society and culture since then could, however, not have been seen by the men of 1900. The geographical explosion of technology has created the first worldwide civilization; and it is a technological civilization. It has already shifted the centre of the world away from Western Europe thousands of miles to both West and East. More important still, modern technology in this century has made men reconsider old concepts, such as the position of women in society, and it has remade basic institutions—work, education, and warfare, for example. It has shifted a large number of people in the technologically advanced countries from working with their hands to working, almost without direct contact with materials and tools, with their minds. It has changed the physical environment of man from one of nature to the man-made big city. It has further changed man’s horizon. While it converts the entire world into one rather tight community sharing knowledge, information, hopes, and fears, technology has brought outer space into man’s immediate, conscious experience. It has converted an apocalyptic promise and an apocalyptic threat into concrete possibilities here and now: offering both the utopia of a world without poverty and the threat of the final destruction of humanity.
Finally, in the past sixty years man’s view of technology itself has changed. We no longer see it as concerned with things only; today it is a concern of man as well. As a result of this new perspective we have come to realize that technology is not, as our grandparents believed, the magic wand that can make all human problems and limitations disappear. We now know that technological potential is, indeed, even greater than they thought. But we have also learned that technology, as a creature of man, is as problematical, as ambivalent, and as capable of good or evil, as is its creator.
This paper will attempt to point out some of the most important changes which modern technology has brought about in society and culture, and some changes in our own view of and approach to technology thus far, in the twentieth century.
Technology Remakes Social Institutions
Twentieth-century history, up to the 1960s, can be divided into three major periods: the period before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914—a period culturally and politically much like the nineteenth century; the First World War and the twenty years from 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939; and from World War II until today. In each of these periods modern technology has shaped basic institutions of Western society. And in the most recent period it has started to undermine and remake, also, many of the basic institutions of non-Western society.
Emancipation of Women
In the years before World War I technology, in large measure, brought about the emancipation of women and gave them a new position in society. No nineteenth-century feminist, such as Susan B. Anthony, had as strong an impact on the social position of women as did the typewriter and telephone. If the “Help Wanted” advertisement of 1880 said “typist” or “telegrapher” everybody knew that a man was wanted, whereas the ad of 1910 for a typist or telephone operator was clearly offering a woman’s job. The typewriter and the telephone enabled the girl from a decent family to leave home and make a respectable living on her own, not dependent on a husband or father. The need for women to operate typewriters and switchboards forced even the most reluctant European governments to provide public secondary education for girls, the biggest single step towards granting women equality. The flood of respectable and well-educated young women in offices then made heavy demands for changes in the old laws that withheld from women the right to enter into contracts or to control their own earnings and property, and finally forced men by 1920 to give women the vote almost everywhere in the Western world.
Changes in the Organization of Work
Technology soon began to bring about an even greater transformation about the time of World War I. It started to make over the manual work that had always provided a livelihood for the great majority of people—as it still does in technologically underdeveloped countries. The starting point was the application of modern technological principles to manual work, which went under the name of Scientific Management and was largely developed by an American, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915).
While Henry Ford made the systems innovation of mass production, Taylor applied to manual operations the principles that machine designers during the nineteenth century had learned to apply to the work of a tool; he identified the work to be done; broke it down into its individual operations; designed the right way to do each operation; and finally he put the operations together, this time in the sequence in which they could be done fastest and most economically. All this strikes us today as commonplace, but it was the first time that work had been looked at; throughout history it had always been taken for granted.
The immediate result of Scientific Management was a revolutionary cut in the cost of manufactured goods—often to one-tenth, sometimes to one-twentieth of what they had been before. What had been rare luxuries inaccessible to all but the rich, such as automobiles or household appliances, rapidly became available to the broad masses. More important, perhaps, is the fact that Scientific Management made possible sharp increases in wages while at the same time lowering the total cost of the product. Hitherto lower costs of a finished product had always meant lower wages to the worker producing it. Scientific Management preached the contrary: that lower costs should mean higher wages and higher income for the worker. To bring this about was indeed Taylor’s main intent and that of his disciples, who, unlike many earlier technologists, were motivated as much by social as by technical considerations. “Productivity” at once became something the technologist could raise, if not create. And with it, the standard of living of a whole economy might be raised, something totally impossible—indeed, almost unimaginable—at any earlier time.
At the same time, Scientific Management rapidly changed the structure and composition of the work force. It first led to wholesale upgrading of the labour force. The unskilled “labourer” working at a subsistence wage, who constituted the largest single group in the nineteenth-century labour force, became obsolete. In his place appeared a new group, the machine operators—the men on the automobile assembly line, for instance. They themselves were no more skilled, perhaps, than the labourers, but the technologist’s knowledge had been injected into their work through Scientific Management so that they could be paid—and were soon being paid—the wages of highly skilled workers. Between 1910 and 1940 the machine operators became the largest single occupational group in every industrial country, pushing both farmers and labourers out of first place. The consequences for mass consumption, labour relations, and politics were profound and are still with us.
Taylor’s work rested on the assumption that knowledge, rather than manual skill, was the fundamental productive resource. Taylor himself preached that productivity required that “doing” be divorced from “planning,” that is, that it be based on systematic technological knowledge. His work resulted in a tremendous expansion of the number of educated people needed in the work force and, ultimately, in a complete shift in the focus of work from labour to knowledge.
What is today called automation is conceptually a logical extension of Taylor’s Scientific Management. Once operations have been analysed as if they were machine operations and organized as such (and Scientific Management did this successfully), they should be capable of being performed by machines rather than by hand. Taylor’s work immediately increased the demand for educated people in the work force, and eventually, after World War II, it began to produce a work force in advanced countries like the United States in which educated people applying their knowledge to the job are the actual “workers,” and outnumber the manual workers, whether labourers, machine operators, or craftsmen.
The substitution of knowledge for manual effort as the productive resource in work is the greatest change in the history of work, which is, of course, a process as old as man himself. This change is still in progress, but in the industrially advanced countries, especially in the United States, it has already completely changed society. In 1900 eighteen out of every twenty Americans earned their living by working with their hands, ten of the eighteen as farmers. By 1965, only five out of twenty of a vastly increased American labour force did manual work, and only one worked on the farm. The rest earned their living primarily with knowledge, concepts, or ideas—altogether, with things learned in school rather than at the workbench. Not all of this knowledge is, of course, advanced; the cashier in the cafeteria is also a “knowledge worker,” though of very limited extent. But all of it is work that requires education, that is, systematic mental training rather than skill in the sense of exposure to experience.
The Role of Education
As a result, the role of education in twentieth-century industrial society has changed—another of the very big changes produced by technology. By 1900 technology had advanced so far that literacy had become a social need in the industrial countries. A hundred years earlier literacy was essentially a luxury as far as society was concerned; only a handful of people—ministers, lawyers, doctors, government officials, and merchants—needed to be able to read and write. Even for a high-ranking general, such as Wellington’s partner at Waterloo, the Prussian Field Marshal Bluecher, illiteracy was neither a handicap nor a disgrace. In the factory or the business office of 1900, however, one had to be able to read and write, if only at an elementary school level. By 1965 those without a substantial degree of higher education, more advanced than anything that had been available even to the most educated two hundred years ago, were actually becoming unemployable. Education has moved, from having been an ornament, if not a luxury, to becoming the central economic resource of technological society. Education is therefore rapidly becoming a center of spending and investment in the industrially developed society.
This stress on education is creating a changed society; access to education is best given to everyone, if only because society needs all the educated people it can get. The educated man resents class and income barriers which prevent the full exercise of this knowledge, and because society requires and values the services of the expert it must allow him full recognition and rewards for his talents. In a completely technological civilization, education replaces money and rank as the index of status and opportunities.
Change in Warfare
By the end of World War II technology had completely changed the nature of warfare, and altered the character of war as an institution. When Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the father of modern strategic thought, called war “a continuation of policy by other means,” he only expressed in an epigram what every politician and every military leader had known all along. War was always a gamble. War was cruel and destructive. War, the great religious leaders always preached, is sin. But war was also a normal institution of human society and a rational tool of policy. Many of the contemporaries, including Clausewitz himself, considered Napoleon wicked, but none thought him insane for using war to impose his political will on Europe.
The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 changed all this. Since then it has become increasingly clear that major war no longer can be considered normal, let alone rational. Total war has ceased to be a usable institution of human society because in full-scale, modern technological warfare, there is no defeat, just as there is no victory. There is only total destruction. There are no neutrals and no noncombatants.
A Worldwide Technological Civilization
World War II brought modern technology in its most advanced forms directly to the most remote corners of the earth. All armies required modern technology to provide the sinews of war and the instruments of warfare. And all used non-Western people either as soldiers in technological war or as workers on modern machinery to provide war material. This made everyone in the world aware of the awesome power of modern technology.
This, however, might not have had a revolutionary impact upon older, non-Western, nontechnological societies but for the promise of Scientific Management to make possible systematic economic development. The new-found power to create productivity through the systematic effort we now call industrialization has raised what President John F. Kennedy called “the rising tide of human expectations,” the hope that technology can banish the age-old curse of disease and early death, of grinding poverty, and ceaseless toil. And whatever else this may require, it demands acceptance by society of a thoroughly technological civilization.
The shift of focus in the struggle between social ideologies shows this clearly. Before World War II free enterprise and communism were generally measured throughout the world by their respective claims to have superior ability to create a free and just society. Since World War II the question has largely been: which system is better at speeding economic development to a modern technological civilization? India offers another illustration. Until his death in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi opposed industrialization and sought a return to a preindustrial technology, symbolized in the hand spinning wheel. His close comrade and disciple Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was forced, however, by public opinion to embrace “economic development,” that is, forced-draft industrialization emphasizing the most modern technology, as soon as he became the first prime minister of independent India in 1947.
Even in the West, where it grew out of the indigenous culture, technology has in the twentieth century raised fundamental problems for society and has challenged—if not overthrown—deeply rooted social and political institutions. Wherever technology moves it has an impact on the position of women in society; on work and the worker; on education and social mobility; and on warfare. Since this is the case, in the non-Western societies modern technology demands a radical break with social and cultural tradition; and it produces a fundamental crisis in society. How the non-Western world will meet this crisis will, in large measure, determine what man’s history will be in the latter twentieth century—even, perhaps, whether there will be any more human history. But unless the outcome is the disappearance of man from this planet, our civilization will remain irrevocably a common technological civilization.
Man Moves into a Man-Made Environment
By 1965 the number living on the land and making their living off it had dwindled in the U.S. to one out of every twenty. Man had become a city-dweller. At the same time, man in the city increasingly works with his mind, removed from materials. Man in the twentieth century has thus moved from an environment that was essentially still nature to an environment, the large city and knowledge work, that is increasingly man-made. The agent of this change has, of course, been technology.
Technology, as has been said before, underlies the shift from manual to mental work. It underlies the tremendous increase in the productivity of agriculture which, in technologically developed countries like the United States or those of Western Europe, has made one farmer capable of producing, on less land, about fifteen times as much as his ancestor did in 1800 and almost ten times as much as his ancestors in 1900. It therefore enabled man to tear himself away from his roots in the land to become a city-dweller.
Indeed, urbanization has come to be considered the index of economic and social development. In the United States and in the most highly industrialized countries of Western Europe up to three-quarters of the population now live in large cities and their suburbs. A country like the Soviet Union, that still requires half its people to work on the land to be adequately fed, is, no matter how well developed industrially, an “underdeveloped country.”
The big city is, however, not only the centre of modern technology; it is also one of its creations. The shift from animal to mechanical power, and especially to electrical energy (which needs no pasture lands), made possible the concentration of large productive facilities in one area. Modern materials and construction methods make it possible to house, move, and supply a large population in a small area. Perhaps the most important prerequisite of the large modern city, however, is modern communications, the nerve centre of the city and the major reason for its existence. The change in the type of work a technological society requires is another reason for the rapid growth of the giant metropolis. A modern society requires that an almost infinite number of specialists in diverse fields of knowledge be easy to find, easily accessible, and quickly and economically available for new and changing work. Businesses or government offices move to the city, where they can find the lawyers, accountants, advertising men, artists, engineers, doctors, scientists, and other trained personnel they need. Such knowledgeable people, in turn, move to the big city to have easy access to their potential employers and clients.
Only sixty years ago, men depended on nature and were primarily threatened by natural catastrophes, storms, floods, or earthquakes. Men today depend on technology, and our major threats are technological breakdowns. The largest cities in the world would become uninhabitable in forty-eight hours were the water supply or the sewage systems to give out. Men, now city-dwellers, have become increasingly dependent upon technology, and our habitat is no longer a natural ecology of wind and weather, soil and forest, but a man-made ecology. Nature is no longer an immediate experience; New York City children go to the Bronx Zoo to see a cow. And whereas sixty years ago a rare treat for most Americans was a trip to the nearest market town, today most people in the technologically advanced countries attempt to “get back to nature” for a vacation.
Modern Technology and the Human Horizon
Old wisdom—old long before the Greeks—held that a community was limited to the area through which news could easily travel from sunrise to sunset. This gave a “community” a diameter of some fifty miles or so. Though each empire—Persian, Roman, Chinese, and Inca—tried hard to extend this distance by building elaborate roads and organizing special speedy courier services, the limits on man’s horizon until the late nineteenth century remained unchanged and confined to how far one man could travel by foot or on horseback in one day.
By 1900 there were already significant changes. The railroad had extended the limit of one day’s travel to seven hundred miles or more—the distance from New York to Chicago or from Paris to Berlin. And, for the first time, news and information were made independent of the human carrier through the telegraph, which carried them everywhere practically instantaneously. It is no accident that a very popular book of technological fiction to this day is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. For the victory of technology over distance is, perhaps, the most significant of all the gifts modern technology has brought man.
Today the whole earth has become a local community if measured by the old yardstick of one day’s travel. The commercial jet plane can reach, in less than twenty-four hours, practically any airport on earth. And unlike any earlier age, the common man can and does move around and is no longer rooted to the small valley of his birth. The motor vehicle has given almost everyone the power of mobility, and with physical ability to move around comes a new mental outlook and a new social mobility. The technological revolution on the American farm began in earnest when the farmer acquired wheels; he immediately became mobile, too, in his mental habits and accessible to new ideas and techniques. The beginning of the Negro drive for civil rights in the American South came with the used car. Behind the wheel of a Model T a Negro was as powerful as any white man, and his equal. Similarly, the Indian worker on the Peruvian sugar plantation who has learned to drive a truck will never again be fully subservient to the white manager. He has tasted the new power of mobility, a greater power than the mightiest kings of yesterday could imagine. It is no accident that young people everywhere dream of a car of their own; four-wheeled mobility is a true symbol of freedom from the restraints of traditional authority.
News, data, information, and pictures have become even more mobile than people. They travel in “real time,” that is, they arrive at virtually the same time as they happen. They have, moreover, become universally accessible. The radio brings to anyone in possession of a cheap and simple receiving set news in his own language from any of the world’s major capitals. Television and movies present the world everywhere as immediate experience. And beyond the earth itself the horizon of man has, within the last two decades, extended out into stellar space. It is not just a bigger world, therefore, into which twentieth-century technology has moved the human being; it is a different world.
Technology and Man
In this different world, technology itself is seen differently; we are aware of it as a major element in our lives, indeed, in human life throughout history. We are becoming aware that the major questions regarding technology are not technical but human questions, and are coming to understand that a knowledge of the history and evolution of technology is essential to an understanding of human history. Furthermore, we are rapidly learning that we must understand the history, the development, and the dynamics of technology in order to master our contemporary technological civilization, and that, unless we do so, we will have to submit to technology as our master.
The naïve optimism of 1900, which expected technology somehow to create paradise on earth, would be shared by few people today. Most would also ask: What does technology do to man as well as for him? For it is only too obvious that technology brings problems, disturbances, and dangers as well as benefits. First, economic development based on technology carries the promise of abolishing want over large parts of the earth. But there is also the danger of total war leading to total destruction; and the only way we now know to control this danger is by maintaining in peacetime a higher level of armaments in all major industrial countries than any nation has ever maintained. This hardly seems a fitting answer to the problem, let alone a permanent one. Also, modern public-health technology—insecticides above all—has everywhere greatly increased man’s life span. But since birth rates in the under-developed countries remain at their former high level while the death rates have declined, the world’s poor nations are threatened by a population explosion which not only eats up all the fruits of economic development but threatens world famine and new pestilence. In government, modern technology and the modern economy founded on it have outmoded the national state as a viable unit. Even Great Britain, with fifty million inhabitants, has been proven in recent decades to have too small a productive base and market for independent economic survival and success. Nationalism is still the most potent political force, as developments in the new nations of Asia and Africa clearly show; yet the revolution in transportation and communication has made national borders an anachronism, respected by neither aircraft nor electronic waves.
The metropolis has become the habitat of modern man. Yet paradoxically we do not know how to make it habitable. We have no effective political institutions to govern it. Urban decay and traffic jams, overcrowding and urban crime, juvenile delinquency and loneliness are endemic in all modern great cities. No one looking at any of the world’s big cities would maintain that they offer an aesthetically satisfying environment. The divorce from direct contact with nature in work with soil and materials has permitted us to live much better; yet technological change itself seems to have speeded up so much as to deprive us of the psychological and cultural bearings we need.
The critics of technology and dissenters from technological optimism in 1900 were lonely voices. Disenchantment with technology did not set in until after World War I and the coming of the Great Depression. The new note was first fully struck in the novel Brave New World by the English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), published in 1932, at the very bottom of the Depression. In this book Huxley portrayed the society of the near future as one in which technology had become the master, and man, its abject slave, was kept in bodily comfort without knowledge of want or pain but also without freedom, beauty, or creativity, indeed, without a personal existence. Five years later the most popular actor of the period, the great Charlie Chaplin (1889–), drove home the same idea in his movie Modern Times, which depicted the common man as the hapless and helpless victim of a dehumanized technology. These two artists have set the tone: only by renouncing modern civilization altogether can man survive as man. This theme has since been struck with increasing frequency, and certainly with increasing loudness. The pessimists of today, however, suffer from a bad case of romantic delusion; the “happier society of the pre-industrial past” they invoked never existed. In the late thirteenth century, Genghis Khan and his Mongols, whose raids covered an area from China to central Europe, killed as many people—and a much larger proportion of a much smaller population—as two twentieth-century world wars and Hitler put together, yet their technology was the bow and arrow.
However much justice there may be in Huxley’s and Charlie Chaplin’s thesis, it is sterile. The repudiation of technology they advocate is clearly not the answer. The only positive alternative to destruction by technology is to make technology work as our servant. In the final analysis this surely means mastery by man over himself, for if anyone is to blame, it is not the tool but the human maker and user. “It is a poor carpenter who blames his tools,” says an old proverb. It was naïve of the nineteenth-century optimist to expect paradise from tools and it is equally naive of the twentieth-century pessimists to make the new tools the scapegoat for such old shortcomings as man’s blindness, cruelty, immaturity, greed, and sinful pride.
It is also true that better tools demand a better, more highly skilled, and more careful carpenter. As its ultimate impact on man and his society, twentieth-century technology, by its very mastery of nature, may thus have brought man face to face again with his oldest and greatest challenge: himself.
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First published in vol. 2 of Technology in Western Civilization, ed. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).