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Title: Authoritarian and Democratic Technics
Author: Lewis Mumford
Date: 1964
Language: en
Topics: democracy, autonomy, authority, technology, science
Source: Retrieved on July 26, 2012 from http://www.primitivism.com/mumford.htm
Notes: From Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. l (Winter, 1964), pp. 1–8

Lewis Mumford

Authoritarian and Democratic Technics

“Democracy” is a term now confused and sophisticated by indiscriminate

use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we agree, no

matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the spinal

principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that

which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself? This

is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized

knowledge, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these

may, by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy.

But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather

than the part; and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic

expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of

others.

Around this central principle clusters a group of related ideas and

practices with a long foreground in history, though they are not always

present, or present in equal amounts, in all societies. Among these

items are communal self-government, free communication as between

equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection

against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral

responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community. All living

organisms are in some degree autonomous in that they follow a

life-pattern of their own; but in man this autonomy is an essential

condition for his further development. We surrender some of our autonomy

when ill or crippled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion

would be to turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life

possible — and here I am consciously treading on contested ground — is

one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction,

self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once

the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every

man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated.

In framing this provisional definition I trust that I have not, for the

sake of agreement, left out anything important. Democracy, in the primal

sense I shall use the term, is necessarily most visible in relatively

small communities and groups, whose members meet frequently face to

face, interact freely, and are known to each other as persons. As soon

as large numbers are involved, democratic association must be

supplemented by a more abstract, depersonalized form. Historic

experience shows that it is much easier to wipe out democracy by an

institutional arrangement that gives authority only to those at the apex

of the social hierarchy than it is to incorporate democratic practices

into a well organized system under centralized direction, which achieves

the highest degree of mechanical efficiency when those who work it have

no mind or purpose of their own.

The tension between small-scale association and large-scale

organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation,

between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created

a critical situation. If our eyes had been open, we might long ago have

discovered this conflict deeply embedded in technology itself.

I wish it were possible to characterize technics with as much hope of

getting assent, with whatever quizzical reserves you may still have, as

in this description of democracy. But the very title of this paper is, I

confess, a controversial one; and I cannot go far in my analysis without

drawing on interpretations that have not yet been adequately published,

still less widely discussed or rigorously criticized and evaluated. My

thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near

East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently

existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first

system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other

man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am

right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we

radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics

will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual

autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful

device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders

in totalitarian countries.

The data on which this thesis is based are familiar; but their

significance has, I believe, been overlooked. What I would call

democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting

mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing

machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the

farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts

and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of

nature. This technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just

because of its wide diffusion and its modest demands, it had great

powers of adaptation and recuperation. This democratic technics has

underpinned and firmly supported every historic culture until our own

day, and redeemed the constant tendency of authoritarian technics to

misapply its powers. Even when paying tribute to the most oppressive

authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the

farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity. No royal

mace, no slave-driver’s whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint

on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth century Athens.

If this democratic technics goes back to the earliest use of tools,

authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins

around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical

invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control

that gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without

eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship,

activities that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human

measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of

theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an

absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic powers came down to earth,

mobilizing and unifying the efforts of thousands of men, hitherto

all-too-autonomous and too decentralized to act voluntarily in unison

for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon.

The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or

human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested

on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought

into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of

horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented.

This centralized technics drew on inventions and scientific discoveries

of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy,

irrigation and canalization: above all, it created complex human

machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable,

interdependent parts — the work army, the military army, the

bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of

human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass

destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable. Despite its

constant drive to destruction, this totalitarian technics was tolerated,

perhaps even welcomed, in home territory, for it created the first

economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not

merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained

minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military

activity. But the efficiency of the system was impaired by weaknesses

that were never overcome until our own day.

To begin with, the democratic economy of the agricultural village

resisted incorporation into the new authoritarian system. So even the

Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes

were collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in

religion and government. Moreover, as long as agriculture absorbed the

labor of some 90 per cent of the population, mass technics were confined

largely to the populous urban centers. Since authoritarian technics

first took form in an age when metals were scarce and human raw

material, captured in war, was easily convertible into machines, its

directors never bothered to invent inorganic mechanical substitutes. But

there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a

break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the

great human machines fell apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole

system was based — particularly the essential myth of kingship — were

irrational, with their paranoid suspicions and animosities and their

paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power. For all

its redoubtable constructive achievements, authoritarian technics

expressed a deep hostility to life.

By now you doubtless see the point of this brief historic excursus. That

authoritarian technics has come back today in an immensely magnified and

adroitly perfected form. Up to now, following the optimistic premises of

nineteenth century thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we

have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechanical

invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all

democratic, industrial society. Many have even comfortably supposed that

the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century

was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied

it. But what we have interpreted as the new freedom now turns out to be

a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of

political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly

nullified by the successful resurrection of a centralized authoritarian

technics — a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of

the world.

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations,

threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a

once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more

effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a

military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than

in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the

transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of

this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong

democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific

ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic

purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has

now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions.

The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the

pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar

myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their

increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and

compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems:

particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at

whatever eventual co st to life.

Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this

authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most

serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes

actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor

purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.

Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is

marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to

increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat

control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge

or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or

automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain

organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms

of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by

national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction,

designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would

be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal

and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human

limits.

The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible

personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships

the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all

its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the

sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret

knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected,

are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they

have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of

the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with

the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship;

and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational

compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of

their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon

of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job’s

God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the

pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to

displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the

machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the

organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.

Do not misunderstand this analysis. The danger to democracy does not

spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic

inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian

technics of our own day date back to a period before even the wheel had

been invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis

Bacon and Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics,

our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that

deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the

historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and —

makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself,

the chief purpose of existence. This system has made its way so

insidiously into Western society, that my analysis of its derivation and

its intentions may well seem more questionable — indeed more shocking —

than the facts themselves.

Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the

manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics? The answer

to this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present day technics

differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian

systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has accepted

the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should

have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the

democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole

community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy.

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent

bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member

of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual

and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available

hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift

transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care,

entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely

ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to

take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and

equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the

person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice

remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source,

authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be

mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated

and magnified.

“Is this not a fair bargain?” those who speak for the system will ask.

“Are not the goods authoritarian technics promises real goods? Is this

not the horn of plenty that mankind has long dreamed of, and that every

ruling class has tried to secure, at whatever cost of brutality and

injustice, for itself?” I would not belittle, still less deny, the many

admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a

self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest

that it is time to reckon up the human disadvantages and costs, to say

nothing of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system

itself. Even the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from

being under effective human direction that it may poison us wholesale to

provide us with food or exterminate us to provide national security,

before we can enjoy its promised goods. Is it really humanly profitable

to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to

say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two? Once our

authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with, the aid of its new

forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquillizers and sedatives and

aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is

absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through

the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific

intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so

innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it

would rather ensure the final arrest of any further human development.

Again: do not mistake my meaning. This is not a prediction of what will

happen, but a warning against what may happen.

What means must be taken to escape this fate? In characterizing the

authoritarian technics that has begun to dominate us, I have not

forgotten the great lesson of history: Prepare for the unexpected! Nor

do I overlook the immense reserves of vitality and creativity that a

more humane democratic tradition still offers us. What I wish to do is

to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic

institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include

technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We

must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an

underdimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to

the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.

Curiously, the first words in support of this thesis came forth, with

exquisite symbolic aptness, from a willing agent — but very nearly a

classic victim! — of the new authoritarian technics. They came from the

astronaut, John Glenn, whose life was endangered by the malfunctioning

of his automatic controls, operated from a remote center. After he

barely saved his life by personal intervention, he emerged from his

space capsule with these ringing words: “Now let man take over!”

That command is easier to utter than obey. But if we are not to be

driven to even more drastic measures than Samuel Butler suggested in

Erewhon, we had better map out a more positive course: namely, the

reconstitution of both our science and our technics in such a fashion as

to insert the rejected parts of the human personality at every stage in

the process. This means gladly sacrificing mere quantity in order to

restore qualitative choice, shifting the seat of authority from the

mechanical collective to the human personality and the autonomous group,

favoring variety and ecological complexity, instead of stressing undue

uniformity and standardization, above all, reducing the insensate drive

to extend the system itself, instead of containing it within definite

human limits and thus releasing man himself for other purposes. We must

ask, not what is good for science or technology, still less what is good

for General Motors or Union Carbide or IBM or the Pentagon, but what is

good for man: not machine-conditioned, system-regulated, mass-man, but

man in person, moving freely over every area of life.

There are large areas of technology that can be redeemed by the

democratic process, once we have overcome the infantile compulsions and

automatisms that now threaten to cancel out our real gains. The very

leisure that the machine now gives in advanced countries can be

profitably used, not for further commitment to still other kinds of

machine, furnishing automatic recreation, but by doing significant forms

of work, unprofitable or technically impossible under mass production:

work dependent upon special skill, knowledge, aesthetic sense. The

do-it-yourself movement prematurely got bogged down in an attempt to

sell still more machines; but its slogan pointed in the right direction,

provided we still have a self to do it with. The glut of motor cars that

is now destroying our cities can be coped with only if we redesign our

cities to make fuller use of a more efficient human agent: the walker.

Even in childbirth, the emphasis is already happily shifting from an

officious, often lethal, authoritarian procedure, centered in hospital

routine, to a more human mode, which restores initiative to the mother

and to the body’s natural rhythms.

The replenishment of democratic technics is plainly too big a subject to

be handled in a final sentence or two: but I trust I have made it clear

that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics has

brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a point

at which it will permit human alternatives, human interventions, and

human destinations for entirely different purposes from those of the

system itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not exist, we

would have to invent it, in order to save and recultivate the spirit of

man