Another Mumford Reading Excerpt, The Pentagon of Power

While reading through the first and now the second volume of The Myth of the Machine I have had an urge to pause and reproduce Mumford's brilliantly insightful ideas here with the closing of every chapter but to do that would require an immense amount of time and energy as together both volumes comprise roughly 900 pages of densely packed concepts. Although an able reader, it takes me twice as long to read one page of Mumford's work than it does a page of contemporary literature as it is just so wordy and full of conceptual information to process, if anyone reading this is familiar with the work of Joseph Tainter, particularly his seminal The Collapse of Complex Societies then you will have some idea. Have a look for yourself, I reproduced the entire first chapter of volume one here:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-excerpt-lewis-mumford-myth-of.html

Of all of the books exploring our present predicament I cannot recommend more highly Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine.

Again, if there are spelling errors it is because I am typing this out manually, I am also skipping a section and am not typing the entire chapter as it spans 30 pages, only the beginning sections.


The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, Vol. 2 


Chapter Seven


Mass Production and Human Automation


1: The Pentagon of Power 

So far I have attempted to expose the interplay of human interests and technological pressures that conspired after the sixteenth century to dominate Western Civilization. In time these forces coalesced in the unconscious as a replenished Myth of the Machine. As with the earlier myth, this social and technological transformation might be duly rationalized as a massive practical effort to fulfill human needs and increase material wealth: but beneath it was a deeply subjective and more obsessive drive toward the 'conquest' of nature and the control of life, "to the effecting of all things possible."

I have now to show how the new ideas of order and power and predictability that dominated the new mechanical world picture made their way into every human activity. Within the last four centuries the older tradition of polytechnics was replaced by a system that gave primacy to the machine, with its repetitive motions, its depersonalized processes, its abstract quantitative goals. The later enlargement of these technical possibilities through electronics has only increased the scope and coercive absolutism of the system.

Part of this story is now so familiar that one hesitates even briefly to recapitulate its main features. After the sixth century A.D. in Western Europe some of the harsher features of the older megamachine were eliminated largely by 'etherializing' the power motive in the Roman Catholic Church, and turning lifetime service into the voluntary act of dedicated Christians. This partial transformation, which also ameliorated the lifetime division of labor, was first effected in the Benedictine monastery. While the ascetic routines of the monastic orders favored the machine, their rigorous accountancy of time and their careful control of money and goods were progressively passed on to other forms of bureaucratic organization, private and public, from trading to tax collecting, until by the sixteenth century they had set the style for mercantile enterprise and governmental administration.

Finally, the basic model of all three modes of regimentation, military, monastic, and bureaucratic, was introduced into large-scale industry by the factory system. It was this cumulative mechanical organization, not the steam engine, that accounts for the upsurge of industrial energy after 1750.

Though a considerable part of this transformation can be read in purely technical terms, one must not overlook the shift in human motives through the increasing translation of both political and economic power into purely abstract quantitative terms: mainly, terms of money. Physical power, applied to coerce other human beings, reaches natural limits at an early stage: if one applies too much, the victim dies. So, too, with the command of purely material goods or sensual pleasures. If one eats too much, on suffers from indigestion or is overtaxed by corpulence: if one seeks sensual pleasure too constantly, the capacity for enjoyment decreases and eventually become exhausted.

But when human functions are converted into abstract, uniform units, ultimately units of energy or money, there are no limits to the amount of power that can be seized, converted, and stored. The peculiarity of money is that it knows no biological limits or ecological restrictions. When the Ausburg financier, Jacob Fugger the Elder, was asked when he would have so much money that he would feel no need for more, he replied, as all great magnates tacitly or openly do, that he never expected such a day to come.

Thus the transformation of traditional polytechnics into a uniform, all-embracing monotechnics marked likewise the translation of a limited goods economy, based on a diversity of natural functions and vital human needs, to a power economy, symbolized by and concentrated on money. This transformation had taken thousands of years; and even today [1974] there are billions of people who remain outside the system and govern their activities by a different code. Coined money, a great step toward quantitative abstraction, was a relatively late invention (seventh century B.C.) and standard interchangeable monetary units came far later; while paper money and credit accounting on the scale now practiced was inconceivable before rapid transportation and communication became possible.

This historic process may be condensed in a brief formula: manual work into machine work: machine work into paper work: paper work into electronic simulation of work, divorced progressively from any organic functions or human purposes, except those that further the power system.

An abstract evaluation of goods and services in terms of standard money units, bushels if not coins, had played a role in the earliest power economy and indeed had been passed on, if not independently invented, by even more primitive communities with their cowrie shells and wampum and similar medium and exchange. Accordingly, the persistent inflation of the money motive, from the sixteenth century on, has usually been taken as a mere extension of an existing institution. This would be true if money alone were the only factor. But something more impelling than the traditional pecuniary motives -greed, avarice, luxury- played a part in this explosion.

What took place was a far more commanding and complete transformation: the nucleation of a new power complex, comparable to that which produced the colossal constructive transformations of the Pyramid Age in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. What I have hitherto designated with intentional looseness as the myth of the machine I now propose to define more closely as the Power Complex: a new constellation of forces, interests, and motives, which eventually resurrected the ancient megamachine, and gave it a more perfect technological structure, capable of planetary and even interplanetary extension.

In English, by a happy alliterative accident, the main components of the new power complex all start with the same initial letter, beginning with Power itself: so that one may call it -all the more accurately because of contemporary American overtones- the Pentagon of Power. The basic ingredient was power itself, beginning in the Pyramid Age with such an assemblage of manpower as no earlier group had been capable of bringing into existence. Over the ages, this has been augmented by horsepower, waterpower, windpower, woodpower, coalpower, electricpower, oilpower, and climactically, only yesterday, by nuclear power, itself the ultimate form of power from chemical reactions that had made the gasoline motor and the rocket possible.

Organized political power backed by coercive weapons is the source of both property and productivity: first of all in the cultivation of the land, using sunpower, and then at later stages in every mother mode of production. Mechanical productivity, linked to widening markets, spells profit; and without the dynamic stimulus of profit -that is, money power- the system could not so rapidly expand. This perhaps explains why cruder forms of the megamachine, which favored the military caste rather than the merchant and industrial producer, and relied on tribute and pillage, remained static, and in the end unproductive and unprofitable to the point of repeated bankruptcy. Finally, no less an integral part of the power system is publicity (prestige, panache), through which the merely human directors of the power complex -the military, bureaucratic, industrial, and scientific elite- are inflated to more than human dimensions in order better to maintain authority.

These separate components of the power system derive from the far richer ecological complex -'ecosystem' in scientific parlance- in which all organisms, including man, live and move and have their being. Within that ecosystem, which includes human culture, all of these components of the power complex originally had their place and performed their indispensable functions. What the power complex did was to wrench these separate components from their organic matrix and enclose them in an isolated system centered not on the support and intensification of life but on the expansion of power and personal aggrandizement.

So closely are the components of the power complex related that they perform virtually interchangeable functions: not only in the sense that every operation is reducible to pecuniary terms, bu that money itself in turn can be translated equally into power or property or publicity or public (television) personalities. This interchangeability of the power components was already plain to Heraclitus at the critical moment that the new money economy was in formation. "All things may be reduced to fire," he observed, "and fire to all things, just as goods may be turned into gold and gold into goods."

When any one of these components is weak or absent, or is not closely enough joined to the neighboring processes, the power system cannot work at full speed or with maximum efficiency. But its final goal is a quantitative abstraction -money or its etherialized and potentially limitless equivalent, credit. The latter, like the 'faith' of the Musical Banks in Erewhon, is at bottom only a pious belief that the system will continue indefinitely to work.

Commitments to the power complex and relentless pursuit of pecuniary gains, in both direct and indirect forms, define the power system and prescribe its only acceptable goal, that goal, fitly enough, belongs to the same memorable series of alliterations -progress. In terms of the power system, progress means simply more power, more profit, more productivity, more paper property, more publicity -all convertible into quantitative units. Even publicity can be expressed in column-yards of newspaper clippings and man-hours or television appearance. Each new achievement of the power system, whether in scientific research, in education or medicine, in antibiotics, or in space exploration, will be expressed through the same media for institutional magnification and ego-inflation. The school, the church, the factory, the art museum -each currently plays the same power theme, marching to the same beat, saluting the same flags, joining the interminable columns already assembled on the side streets to become the new leaders of the parade that the kings, the despots, the conquistadors, and the financiers of the Renascence [sic] first marshalled together.

Though the constellation that has formed the power system was not deliberately assembled at any single moment, many of its active components, created in earlier civilizations, had never in fact passed out of existence. Once the restraining codes and ideals of a more humanly conditioned ideology were destroyed, the power system, freed form such institutional competition, swiftly burgeoned.

The power system has often been mistakenly identified with feudalism, with absolute monarchy, with princely despotism, with capitalism, with fascism, with communism, even with the Welfare State. But this multiple identification points to a more important characteristic: the fact that the power complex increasingly underlies all these institutional structure; and as it knits more closely together, seizing more power and governing wider areas, it tends to suppress original cultural differences that once, under feebler political institutions, were visible.

From unrestricted power through expanding pecuniary profit to insatiable pleasure, the most striking thing about this power complex is its studious indifference to other human needs, norms, and goals: it operates in what is, historically speaking, an ecological, cultural, and personal lunar desert, swept only by solar winds.

As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain -that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function on the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current -and hence the intensity of pleasure- can be regulated by the animal himself.

Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money.

What increased the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may -it goes without saying- have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life corroding.

But one unfortunate feature of the pecuniary power complex has still to be noted; for it sets of recent manifestations from the earlier myth of the machine, and makes them even more obstructive to further development. Whereas in the past the power-pleasure nucleus was under the exclusive control of the dominant minority, and so could seduce only this extremely limited group, with the growth of megatechnics all its major features have been distributed, under the canons of mass society (democratic participation) to a far larger population.

To discuss the proliferation of inventions during the last two centuries, the mass production of commodities, and the spread of all the technological factors that are polluting and destroying the living environment, without reference to this immense pecuniary pressure constantly exerted in every technological area, is to ignore the most essential clue to the seemingly automatic and uncontrollable dynamism of the whole system. In order to 'turn on' this insensate pleasure center 'technological man' now threatens to 'turn off' his life. Money has proved the most dangerous of modern man's hallucinogens...

(note: I skipped the second section of this chapter, pages 169-172,  due to time and energy limitations)


3: The Removal of Limits 


Every earlier system of production, whether in agriculture or in handicraft, developed in response to human needs and was dependent upon the energy derived mainly from plant growth, supplemented by animal, wind, and water power. This productivity was restricted, not merely by available natural resources and human capacity, but by the variety of non-utilitarian demands that accompanied it. Esthetic design and qualitative excellence took precedence over mere quantitative output, and kept quantification within tolerable human limits.

In the mechanized, high-energy system developed during the last two centuries, these conditions have been radically altered; and one of the results of commanding a plethora of energy is to place the stress on precisely those parts of our technology that demand the largest quantities of it; namely, those that make the fullest use of power-machines. This new industrial complex is based upon a group of postulates so self-evident to those who have produced the system that they are rarely criticized or challenged -indeed almost never examined- for they are completely identified with the new 'way of life.' Let me list these postulates once more, though I have already touched on them in examining the mechanical world picture.

First: man has only one all-important mission in life: to conquer nature. By conquering nature the technocrat means, in abstract terms, commanding time and space; and in more concrete terms, speeding up every natural process, hastening growth, quickening the pace of transportation, and breaking down communication distances by either mechanical or electronic means. To conquer nature is in effect to remove all natural barriers and human norms and to substitute artificial, fabricated equivalents for natural processes: to replace the immense variety of resources offered by nature by more uniform, constantly available products spewed forth by the machine.

From these general postulates a series of subsidiary ones are derived:  there is only one efficient speed, faster; only one attractive destination, farther away; only one desirable size, bigger; only one rational quantitative goal, more. On these assumptions the object of human life, and therefore of the entire productive mechanism, is to remove limits, to hasten the pace of change, to smooth out seasonal rhythms and reduce regional contrasts -in fine, to promote mechanical novelty and destroy organic continuity. Cultural accumulation and stability thus become stigmatized as signs of human backwardness and insufficiency. By the same token, any institution or way of life, any system of education or production that imposes limits, retards change, or converts the imperious will to conquer nature into a relation of mutual aid and rational accommodation, threatens to undermine the power-pentagon and the scheme of life derived from it.

Now this supposed necessity to conquer nature is not quite so innocent in either its origins or its intentions as might seem. In part, at least, it applies unscrupulously to nature the more ancient ambitions of military conquest and imperialist exploitation; but in part, unfortunately, it is also due to a profound fault in Christian theology, which regarded the earth as man's exclusive property, designed by God solely for his use and enjoyment, and further looked upon all other living creatures as without souls, and so subject to the same treatment as inanimate things. (The present turning of the young to Hindu and Buddhist conceptions may be hopefully interpreted as an attempt to overcome this original ecological error. For the meek and the humble, not the proud , alone are fit to inherit the earth.)

Because these traditional attitudes toward man and nature supported the dominant power motives in post-medieval society, the new system of production lacked any method for normalizing wants or controlling quantity: it not merely lacked them but purposely broke down any older methods such as a concern with fine workmanship or esthetic expression.

Thanks to the proficiency of the machine, the problem of older societies, that of scarcity and insufficiency, was -at least in theory-solved: but a new problem, equally serious but at just the opposite extreme, was raised: the problem of quantity. This problem has many aspects: not merely how to distribute the potential abundance of goods justly, so that the whole community will benefit, but how to allocate the investment in machine-centered organizations without negating or destroying those many human activities and functions that are injured rather than helped by automation. The first of these problems has been far more successfully dealt with in many primitive communities than under any industrialized regime.

The bitter reproach that became popular in America during the economic depression of the nineteen-thirties, "starvation in the midst of plenty," reflected the breakdown in a distribution system whose conventions were based on scarcity. But an equally vexatious form of starvation is that which has been caused through the introduction of mechanized habits of life and automatic machines, by the pressure of overwhelming abundance. One might call this the Strasbourg-goose syndrome: gorging or forced feeding for the sake of further fattening a system of automation that produces quantities beyond the normal requirements of consumption.

Though I must postpone a more comprehensive discussion of this problem to a later point, this is the place to examine the impact of automation in a society that takes quantification and material expansion to be an ultimate good. And since the condition to be analyzed now exists in almost every phase of automation, from food production to nuclear weapons, i shall confine myself largely to the field i have the closest acquaintance with: the automation of knowledge. In this area conventional mechanical automation has up to now played only a small part.

As has happened again and again in technics, the critical step that led to general automation took place in the organization of knowledge before any appropriate automatic machinery was invented. The process has been dated and explained, stage by stage, by an historian of science, Derek Price, in 'Science Since Babylon,' and condensed, with certain necessary corrections, in a later essay.

Well before the automatic machines of the nineteenth century had been invented, science had perfected within its own realm a system of subdivided labor, operating with the standardized parts, confined to limited motions and processes, which paralleled in efficiency Adam Smith's favorite example of pin-making.

The means for effecting this immense outpouring of standardized knowledge, Price points out, was a new method of multiplying and communicating scientific information by means of a small standard unit, the scientific paper, whereby reports on isolated observations and experiments could be promptly circulated in scientific journals. This practical device, based on the earlier invention of the printing press, proved the effective starting point for the systematic automation of knowledge. By now the productivity in this area rivals anything that has been achieved in industrial manufacture. Periodical publication is in itself a phase of automation: once a periodical is set up, the regular flow of material and its regular publication is no longer subject to spontaneous fluctuations of supply or erratic publishing demands: the process instigates the product and punctuates the result -automatically.

Observe the interplay between the mass production of goods and the mass publication of scientific knowledge. Beginning with a single scientific journal in 1665, Price tells us that there were a hundred at teh beginning of the nineteenth century, a thousand by the middle, and ten thousand by 1900. We are already on the way to achieve 100,000 journals in another century. Even allowing for the great increase in population, this is a gigantic advance. In the meanwhile, the enormous output of duplicating machines of every kind, from the mimeograph to the microfilm and Xerox, has multiplied the product. And here again the result is typical of the entire system: before any part of this process, except large-scale printing, was mechanically automated, the entire system exhibited all the virtues and defects of any completely automated unit -expanding productivity in quantities that are unassimilable, without re-introducing the human selections and abstentions that have been excluded from the system.....

http://www.derrickjensen.org/recommended/