Technology for Life by Lewis Herber (1969)
In a future revolution, the most pressing task assigned to technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil. The immediate purpose of this task will be to permanently open the social arena to the revolutionary people, to keep the revolution in permanence. Thus far, every social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the workshop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility of producing the means of survival. Looking back at the brute facts of history, we find that as long as revolution meant continual sacrifice and denial for the people, the reins of power fell into the hands of the political professionals, the mediocrities of Thermidor. How well the liberal Girondins of the French Convention understood this reality can be judged by the fact that they sought to reduce the revolutionary fervour of the Parisian popular assemblies-the great Sections of 1793-by decreeing that the meetings should close at ten in the evening, or, as Carlyle tells us, before the working people come . . . from their jobs. The decree proved ineffective, but its aim was shrewd and unerring. Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, at ten in the evening The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever!
Nearly a half century ago, while Social Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with work for all, those magnificent madmen, the Dadaists, demanded unemployment for everybody. The decades have detracted nothing from this demand; to the contrary, they have given it form and content. From the moment toil is reduced to the barest possible minimum or disappears entirely, however, the problem of survival passes into the problem of life and it is certain that technology itself will pass from the servant of man’s immediate needs into the partner of his creativity.
Let us look at this matter closely.
Much has been written about technology as an extension of man. The phrase is misleading if it is meant to apply to technology as a whole. It has validity primarily for the traditional handicraft shop and, perhaps, for the early stages of machine development. The craftsman dominates the tool; his labor, artistic inclinations, and personality are the sovereign factors in the productive process. Labor is not merely an expenditure of energy but the personalized work of a man whose activities are sensuously directed toward preparing, fashioning, and finally decorating his product for human use. The craftsman guides the tool, not the tool the craftsman. Any alienation that may exist between the craftsman and his product is immediately overcome, as Friedrich Williamsen emphasized, by an artistic judgement-a judgement bearing on a thing to be made. The tool amplifies the powers of the craftsman as a man as a human; it amplifies his power to impart his artistry, his very identity as a creative being, on raw materials.
The development of the machine tends to rupture the intimate relationship between man and the means of production. To the degree that it is a self-operating device, the machine assimilates the worker to preset industrial tasks, tasks over which he exercises no control whatever. The machine now appears as an alien force-apart from and yet wedded to the production of the means of survival. Starting out as an extension of man, technology is transformed into a force above man, orchestrating his life according to a score contrived by an industrial bureaucracy; not men, I repeat, but bureaucracies, i.e., social machines. With the arrival of the fully automatic machine as the predominate means of production, man becomes an extension of the machine, not only of mechanical devices in the productive process but also of social devices in the social process. Man ceases to exist in almost any respect for his own sake. Society is ruled by the harsh maxim: production for the sake of production. The decline from craftsman to worker, from the active to the increasingly passive personality, is completed by man qua consumer-an economic entity whose tastes, values, thoughts, and sensibilities are engineered by bureaucratic teams in think tanks. Man, standardized by machines, is finally reduced to a machine.
This is the trend. Man-the-machine is the bureaucratic ideal. It is an ideal that is continually defied by the rebirth of life, by the reappearance of the young and by the contradictions that unsettle the bureaucracy. Every generation has to be assimilated again, and each time with explosive resistance. The bureaucracy, in turn, never lives up to its own technical ideal. Congested by mediocrities, it errs continually. Its judgement lags behind new situations; insensate, it suffers from social inertia and is always buffeted by chance. Any crack that opens in the social machine is widened by the forces of life.
How can we heal the fracture that separates living men from dead machines without sacrificing either men or machines? How can we transform the technology for survival into the technology for life? To answer any of these questions with Olympian assurance would be idiotic. Liberated man may choose from a large variety of mutually exclusive or combinable alternatives, all of which may be based on unforeseeable technological innovations. As a sweeping solution, they may simply choose to step over the body of technology. They may submerge the cybernated machine in a technological underworld, divorcing it entirely from social life, the community, and creativity.
All but hidden from society, the machines would work for man. Free communities would stand, in effect, at the end of a cybernated industrial assembly line with baskets to cart the goods home. Industry, like the autonomic nervous system, would work on its own, subject to the repairs that our own bodies require in occasional bouts of illness. The fracture separating man from the machine would not be healed. It would simply be ignored.
I do not believe that this is a solution to anything. It would amount to closing off a vital human experience: the stimulus of productive activity, the stimulus of the machine. Technology can play a very important role in forming the personality of man. Every art, as Lewis Mumford has argued, lids its technical side-the self mobilization of spontaneity into expressed order, the need during the highest, most ecstatic moments of subjectivity to retain contact with the objective concreteness that responds with equal sensitivity to all stimuli – and therefore to none at all.
A liberated society, I believe, will not want to negate technology-precisely because it is liberated and can strike a balance. It may well be that it will want to assimilate the machine to artistic craftsmanship. What I mean by this is that the machine will remove toil from the productive process, leaving its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, will participate in human creativity. The potter’s wheel, for example, increased the freedom of the potter, hampered as he had been by the primitive coil method of shaping pottery without the aid of a machine; even the lathe permitted a certain leeway to the craftsman in his fashioning of beads and bulges, observes Mumford. By the same token, there is no reason why automatic, cybernated machinery cannot be used in a way so that the finishing of products, especially those destined for personal use, is left to the community. The machine an absorb the toil involved in mining, smelting, transporting and shaping raw materials, leaving the final stages if artistry and craftsmanship to the individual. We are reminded that most of the stones that make up a medieval cathedral were carefully squared and standardized to facilitate their laying and bonding-a thankless, repetitive, and boring task that can now be done rapidly and effortlessly by modern machines. Once the stone blocks were set in place, the craftsmen made their appearance; inhuman toil was replaced by creative, human work. In a berated community the combination of industrial machines and the craftsman’s tools could reach a degree if sophistication, of creative interdependence unparalleled by any period in human history. William Morris’ vision of return of the crafts would be freed of its nostalgic nuances We could truly speak of a qualitatively new advance in technics-a technology for life.
Having acquired a vitalizing respect for the natural environment and its resources, the free decentralized community will give a new interpretation to the word need. Marx’s realm of necessity, instead of expanding indefinitely, will tend to contract; needs will be humanized and scaled by a higher valuation of life and creativity. Quality and artistry will supplant the current emphasis on quality and standardization; durability will replace the current emphasis on expendability; an economy of cherished things, sanctified by a sense of tradition and by a sense of wonder for the personality and artistry of dead generations, will replace the mindless seasonal restyling of commodities; innovations will be made with a sensitivity or the natural inclinations of man as distinguished from the engineered pollution of taste by the mass media. conservation I replace waste in all things. Freed of bureaucratic manipulation, men will rediscover the beauty of a simpler, uncluttered material life. Clothing, diet, furnishings and homes will become more artistic, more personalized, and more Spartan. Man will recover a sense of the things that are for man, as against the things that have been imposed upon man. The repulsive ritual of bargaining and hoarding will be replaced by the sensitive act of making and giving. Things will cease to be the crutches for an impoverished ego and the mediators between aborted personalities; they will become the product of a rounded, creative individual and the gift of integrated, developing self.
A technology for life can play the vital role of integrating one community with another. Rescaled to a revival of crafts and to a new conception of material needs technology can also function as the sinews of confederation The danger of a national division of labor and of industrial centralization is that technology begins transcend the human scale, becomes increasingly comprehensible, and lends itself to bureaucratic manipulation. To the extent that a shift away from community control occurs in real material terms, technologically and economically, to that extent do centralized institutions acquire real power over the lives of men and threaten to become sources of coercion. A technology for life must be based on the community; it must be tailored to the community and regional level. On this level, however, the sharing of factories and resources can actually promote solidarity between community groups: it can serve to confederate them on the basis not only of common spiritual and cultural interests, but also common material needs. Depending upon the resources and uniqueness of regions, a rational, humanistic balance can be struck between autarchy, industrial confederation, and a national division of labor; the economic weight of society, however, must rest overwhelmingly with communities, both separately and in regional groups.
Is society so complex that an advanced civilization stands in contradiction to a decentralized technology for life? My answer to this question is a categoric, no! Much of the social complexity of our time has its origin in the paperwork, administration, manipulation, and constant wastefulness of capitalist enterprise. The petty bourgeois stands in awe of the bourgeois filing system – the rows of cabinets filled with invoices, accounting books, insurance records, tax forms-and the inevitable dossiers He is, spellbound by the expertise of industrial managers, engineers style-mongers, manipulators of finance, and architects of market consent. He is totally mystified by the state-the sick fat of coercion, control, and domination Modem society is incredibly complex-complex even beyond human comprehension-if we grant that its premises consist of property, production for the take of production, competition, capital accumulation, exploitation, finance, centralization, coercion, bureaucracy-in short, the domination of man by man. Attached to every one of these premises are the institutions that actualize them – offices millions of personnel, forms and staggering tons of paper, desks, typewriters, telephones, and of course, rows upon rows of fling cabinets. As in Kafka’s novels, they are real but strangely dreamlike, indefinable, shadows on the social landscape. The economy has a greater reality to it and is easily mastered by the mind and senses. But it too is intricate if we grant that buttons must be styled in a thousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kind and pattern to create the illusion of innovation and novelty, bathrooms filled to overflowing with a dazzling variety of pharmaceuticals and lotions, kitchens cluttered with an endless number of imbecile appliances (one thinks, here, of the electric can-opener) -the list is endless. (For supplemental reading, consult the advertising pages of the Ladies Home Journal or Good Housekeeping.) If we single out of this odious garbage one or two goods of high quality in the more useful categories and if we eliminate the money economy, the state power, the credit system, the paperwork and policework required to hold society in an enforced state of want, insecurity, and domination, society would not only become reasonably human but also fairly ample.
I do not wish to belittle the fact that behind a single yard of high quality electric wiring lies a copper mine, the machinery needed to operate it, a plant for producing insulating material, a copper-smelting and shaping complex, a transportation system for distributing the wiring and behind each of these complexes, other mines, plants, machine shops, and so forth. Copper mines, certainly of a kind that can be exploited by existing machinery, are not to be found everywhere, although enough copper and other useful metals can be recovered as scrap from the debris of our present society to provide future generations with all they need. But lot us grant that copper will fall within a sizeable category of material that can be furnished only by a national division of labor In what sense need there be a division of labor in the current sense of the term? Bluntly, there need he none at all. First, copper can be exchanged for other goods between the free, autonomous communities that mine it and those that require it. The exchange need not require the mediation of centralized bureaucratic institutions. Secondly, and perhaps More significantly, a community that lives in a region with ample copper resources will not be a more mining community. Copper mining will be one of many economic activities in which it is engaged, a part of a larger, rounded, organic economic arena. The same will hold for communities whose climate is most suitable for growing specialized foods or whose resources are rate and uniquely valuable to society as a whole. Every community will approximate, perhaps in many cases achieve, local or regional autarchy. it will seek to achieve wholeness, not only because wholeness provides material independence (important as this may be), but also because it produces complete, rounded men who live in a symbiotic relationship with their environment. Even if a substantial portion of the economy falls within the sphere of a national division of labor, the overall economic weight of society will still rest with the community. If there is no distortion of communities, there will be no sacrifice of any portion of humanity to the interests of humanity as a whole.
A basic sense of decency, sympathy, and mutual aid lies at the core of human behavior. Even in this lousy bourgeois society, we do not find it unusual that adults will rescue children from danger although the act will imperil their lives; we do not find it strange that miners, for example, will risk death to save their fellow workers in cave-ins or that soldiers will crawl under heavy fire to carry a wounded comrade to safety. What tends to shock us are those occasions when aid is refused-when the cries of a girl who has been stabbed and is being murdered are ignored in a middle-class neighborhood.
Yet there is nothing in this society that would seem to warrant a molecule of solidarity. What solidarity we do find exists despite the society, against all its realities, as an unending struggle between the innate decency of man and the innate indecency of the society. Can we imagine how men would behave if this decency could find full release, if society earned the respect, even the love of the individual? We are still the offspring of a violent, blood-soaked, ignoble history- the end products of man’s domination of man. We may never end this condition of domination. The future may bring us and our shoddy civilization down in a Wagnerian Gotterdammerung. How idiotic it would all be! But we may also end the domination of man by man. We may finally succeed in breaking the chain to the past and gain a humanistic, anarchist society. Would it not be the height of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very criteria we despise in our own time? An end to the sophomoric questions! Free men will not be greedy, one liberated community will not try to dominate another because it has a potential monopoly of copper, computer experts will not try to enslave grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining, tubercular virgins will not be written. We can ask only one thing of the free men of the future: to forgive us that it took so long and that it was such a hard pull. Like Brecht, we can ask that they try not to think of us too harshly, that they give us their sympathy and understand that we lived in the depths of a social hell.
But then they will surely know what to think without our telling them.
Source: WIN magazine – Aug 1969
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