Technics

and theNatureof Man

LEWIS MUMFORD

The last century, we all realize,has witnessed a radicaltransforma-

tion in the entire humanenvironment,largely as a result of the impact
of the mathematicaland physical sciencesupon technology. This shift
from an empirical,tradition-boundtechnics to an experimentalscien-
tific mode has opened up such new realmsas those of nuclearenergy,
supersonic transportation,cybernetic intelligence, and instantaneous
planetarycommunication.
In terms of the currently accepted picture of the relation of man
to technics, our age is passingfrom the primevalstate of man, marked
by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving
mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically diifferentcondition,
in which he will not only have conquerednaturebut detachedhimself
completely from the organic habitat. With this new megatechnics,
man will create a uniform, all-envelopingstructure,designedfor auto-
matic operation.Insteadof functioningactively as a tool-using animal,
man will become a passive,machine-servinganimalwhose properfunc-
tions, if this process continues unchanged,will either be fed into a
machine,or strictly limited and controlledfor the benefit of deperson-
alized collective organizations.The ultimatetendency of this develop-
ment was correctly anticipatedby SamuelButler more than a century
ago; but it is only now that his playful fantasy shows many signs of
becoming a far-from-playfulreality.
My purpose in this paper is to question both the assumptionsand
the predictionsupon which our commitmentto the present form of
technicaland scientificprogress,as an end itself, has been based.In par-
MR.MUMFORD, former president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
is the author of Technics and Civilization (1934), a pioneer work in the history of
technology, Art and Technics (1952), and The City in History (1961), which
won the National Book Award.
This paper is Mr. Mumford's address at the Smithson Bicentennial celebration,
held in Washington, D.C., in September 1965,to commemorate the birth of James
Smithson; it will be included in the volume Knowledge among Men (to be pub-
lished by Simon & Schuster in association with the Smithsonian Institution), con-
taining all the addressesdelivered at the Bicentennial. The paper is published here
by permission of the SmithsonianInstitution.
303
304 Lewis Munford

ticular, I find it necessary to cast doubts upon the generally accepted

theories of man's basic nature which have been implicit during the last
century in our constant overrating of the role of tools and machines
in the human economy. I shall suggest that not only was Karl Marx
in error in giving the instruments of production a central place and
a directive function in human development, but even the seemingly
benign interpretation by Teilhard de Chardin' reads back into the
whole story of man the narrow technological rationalism of our own
age, and projects into the future a final state in which all the further
possibilities of human development would come to an end, because
nothing would be left of man's original nature that had not been
absorbed into, if not suppressed by, the technical organization of in-
telligence into a universal and omnipotent layer of mind.
Since the conclusions I have reached require, for their background,
a large body of evidence I have been marshaling in a still unpublished
book, I am aware that the following summary must, by its brevity,
seem superficial and unconvincing. At best, I can only hope to show
that there are serious reasons for reconsidering the whole picture of
both human and technical development upon which the present organ-
ization of Western society is based.

* * *

Now, we cannot understand the role that technics has played in

human development without a deeper insight into the nature of man;
yet that insight has itself been blurred during the last century because
it has been conditioned by a social environment in which a mass of new
mechanical inventions had suddenly proliferated, sweeping away many
ancient processes and institutions, and altering our very conception
of both human limitations and technical possibilities.
For a century, man has been habitually defined as a tool-using animal.
This definition would have seemed strange to Plato, who attributed
man's rise from a primitive state as much to Marsyas and Orpheus as to
Prometheus and Hephaestos, the blacksmith-god. Yet the description
of man as essentially a tool-using and tool-making animal, has become
so firmly accepted that the mere finding of the fragments of skulls,
in association with roughly shaped pebbles, as with S. L. Leakey's
Australopithecines, is deemed sufficient to identify the creature as a
protohuman, despite marked physical divergences from both earlier
apes and later men.2
1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,The Phenomenon Man (New
of York, 1959).
2 Kenneth P.
Oakley, Man the Tool-Maker (5th ed.; London, 1963).
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 305
Two substantial errors are imbedded in this general interpretation.
The first is the unintentional distortion of evidence, through the fact
that the only durable remains of either early man or his hominid an-
cestors are an extremely scanty supply of bones and stones, presumably
tools-though apart from grubbing, pounding, and ripping, one can
only guess what purpose they served. The durability of stone artifacts
has given this part of man's technical equipment a prominence it could
never have claimed if the far richer store of organic materials, which
early man shared with many primate ancestors, had been preserved.
But it is an illusion to suppose that man's technical development was
confined to exploiting stone quarries, to flint-chipping, to the manip-
ulation of tools alone; for the source of man's early technics was the
whole natural environment-edible plants and animals, vines, leaves,
shells, reeds, twigs, bark, fiber, skins-all of which, save the last, can be
utilized without other tools than man's own unaided teeth and hands.
By fastening attention on the surviving stone artifacts, many anthro-
pologists and ethnologists have gratuitously attributed to the shaping
and using of tools the enlargement of the human brain and therewith
the development of man's higher intelligence, though motor-sensory
co-ordinations involved in this elementary manufacture do not call for
or evoke any considerable mental acuteness. Since the subhominids of
South Africa had a brain capacity about a third of Homo sapiens, no
greater indeed than that of many apes, the capacity to make tools
neither called for nor generated early man's rich cerebral equipment,
as Ernst Mayr of Harvard has recently pointed out.3
The second error in interpreting man's nature is a less pardonable
one, since Francis Bacon should long ago have put scientists on guard
against it; and that is the current tendency to read back into prehistoric
times modern man's overwhelming interest in tools and machines, to
the exclusion of equally important items of technical equipment. Tools
and weapons are specialized extrapolations of man's own
organs for
pushing, pounding, crunching, cutting, stabbing-all basic motor activi-
ties. No one can doubt that these dynamic processes, which man shares
with many other species, formed an essential part of his earliest tech-
nical complex.
But just because man's need for tools is so obvious, we must guard
against overemphasizing the role of tools hundreds of thousands of years
before they became functionally efficient. In treating
tool-making as
central to the paleolithic economy, ethnologists have
underplayed, or
neglected, a mass of activities in which many other species were for long
far more knowledgeable than man. Despite the
contrary evidence put
3 Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution
(Cambridge,Mass., 1963).
306 Lewis Mumford
forward by R. V. Sayce,4 Daryll Forde,5 and Andre Leroi-Gourhan,6
there is still a tendency to identify tools and machines with technology
-to substitute a part for the whole. Even in describing only the material
components of technics, this practice overlooks the equally vital role
of containers: hearths, pits, houses, pots, sacks, clothes, traps, bins,
byres, baskets, bags, ditches, reservoirs, canals, cities. These static
components play an important part in every technology, not least in
our own day, with its high-tension transformers, its giant chemical
retorts, its atomic reactors.
In any comprehensive definition of technics, it should be plain that
many insects, birds, and mammals had made far more radical innova-
tions in the fabrication of containers, with their intricate nests and
bowers, their geometirc beehives, their urbanoid anthills and termi-
taries, than man's ancestors had achieved in the making of tools until
the emergence of Homo sapiens. In short, if technical proficiency were
alone sufficient to identify potential intelligence, man would for long
have rated as a hopeless duffer alongside many other species. The con-
sequences of this perception should be plain, namely, that there was
nothing uniquely human in early technology until it was modified by
linguistic symbols and aesthetic designs. At that point, the human
mind, not just the hand, made a profound difference.
At the beginning, then, I suggest that the human race had achieved
no special position by reason of its tool-using or tool-making propen-
sities alone. Or rather, man at the beginning possessed one primary all-
purpose tool that was more important than any later assemblage,
namely his own mind-activated body, every part of it, not just those
motor activities that produced hand axes and wooden spears. To
compensate for his extremely primitive working gear, early man had
a much more important asset that widened his whole technical horizon:
he had far richer biological equipment than any other animals, a body
not specialized for any single activity but, precisely because of its
extraordinary plasticity, more effective in using a larger portion of
both his external environment and his internal psychosomatic resources.
Through man's overdeveloped and incessantly active brain, he had
more mental energy to tap than he needed for survival at a purely
animal level; and he was accordingly under the necessity of canalizing
that energy, not just into food-getting and reproduction, but into modes
4 R. U.
Sayce, Primitive Arts and Crafts:An Introduction to the Study of Mate-
rial Culture (Cambridge,1933).
5 C. Daryll Forde, Habitat, Economy, and Society: A Geographical Introduction
to Ethnology (London, 1945).
6 Andre Leroi-Gourhan,Milieu et Techniques (Paris, 1945).
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 307
of living that would convertthis energy more directly and constructive-
ly into appropriatecultural-that is, symbolic-forms. Culturalwork, by
necessity, took precedence over manualwork; this involved far more
than the disciplineof hand, muscle, and eye in makingand using tools.
It likewise demandeda control of all man'sbiologicalfunctions,includ-
ing his bodily organs,his emotions,his sexualactivities,his dreams.Even
the handwas no mere horny work-tool: it strokeda lover'sbody, held a
baby close to the breast, made significant gestures, or expressed in
ordereddance and sharedritualsome otherwiseinexpressiblesentiment
about life or death,a rememberedpast or an anxiousfuture. Tool-tech-
nics is but a fragmentof biotechnics:man'stotal equipmentfor life.
On this view, one may well hold it an open question whether the
standardizedpatternsand the repetitiveorder which came to play such
an effective part in the developmentof tools from an early time on, as
Braidwoodhas pointed out,7 derive solely from tool-making.Do they
not ratherderiveeven more,perhaps,from the forms of ritual,song, and
dance-formsthat exist in a state of perfection among primitivepeoples,
often in a far more exquisitelyfinishedstate than their tools? There is,
in fact, widespreadevidence, first noted by Hocart,8that ritual exacti-
tude in ceremonyprecededmechanicalexactitudein work, that the first
rigorous division of labor came through specializationin ceremonial
offices.
These facts help to explainwhy simplepeopleswho easily get bored
by purely mechanicaltasksthat might improvetheir physicalwell-being
will, nevertheless,repeata meaningfulritual,often to the point of physi-
cal exhaustion.The debt of technics to play and to play-toys, to myth
and fantasy,to magic rite and religiousrote, which I called attentionto
in Technics and Civilization,has still to be sufficiently recognized,
though J. Huizinga,in Homo Ludens,went so far as to treatplay itself
as the basic formativeelementin all culture.
Tool-making,in the narrow technicalsense, may indeed go back to
our hominid African ancestors.But the technical equipmentof "Chel-
lean"and Acheuliantimesremainedextremelylimiteduntil a more rich-
ly endowed creature,with a nervous system nearerto that of Homo
sapiensthan to any primevalhominidpredecessors,had come into exist-
ence and brought into operationnot alone his hands and legs but his
entire body and mind, projectingthem not just in tools and utensilsbut
in more purely symbolic non-utilitarianforms.
* * *

7 Robert J. Braidwood, Prehistoric Men (5th ed.;

Chicago, 1961).
8 A. N. Hocart, The Progress of Man (London, 1933).
 308 Lewis Mumford
In this revision of the accepted technological stereotypes, I would go
even further: for I submit that at every stage man's technological expan-
sions and transformations were less for the purpose of increasing the
food supply or controlling nature than for utilizing his immense actual
resources and expressing his latent potentialities in order to fulfil more
adequately his own unique superorganic needs. When not threatened by
hostile environmental pressures, man's elaboration of symbolic culture
answered a more imperious need than that for control over the external
environment-and, as one must infer, largely predated it and for long
outpaced it. Leslie White deserves credit for giving due weight to this
fact by his emphasis on "minding" and "symboling."9
On this reading, the invention of language-a culmination of man's
more elementary forms of expressing and transmitting meaning-was in-
comparably more important to further human development than the
chipping of a mountain of hand-axes. Besides the relatively simple co-
ordinations required for tool using, the delicate interplay of the many
organs needed for the creation of articulate speech was a far more strik-
ing advance and must have occupied a great part of early man's time,
energy, and mental concentration, since its collective product, language,
was infinitely more complex and sophisticated at the dawn of civiliza-
tion than the Egyptian or Mesopotamian kit of tools. For only when
knowledge and practice could be stored in symbolic forms and passed
on by word of mouth from generation to generation was it possible to
keep each fresh cultural acquisition from dissolving with the passing
moment or the dying generation. Then, and then only, did the domesti-
cation of plants and animals become possible. Need I remind you that
this decisive technical transformation, sometimes termed a "revolution,"
was achieved with no better tools than the digging stick, the ax, the
mattock? The plow, like the cart wheel, came later as a specialized adap-
tation to the large-scale field cultivation of grain.
To consider man as primarily a tool-using animal, then, is to overlook
the main chapters of human prehistory. Even when one considers the
technical milieu alone, this concentration on the dynamic components
results in our having long treated as negligible that vast area of technics
in which man's control of chemical changes through heat and fermenta-
tion, leaching and sterilizing-as in brewing, burning, melting, tanning,
cooking-favorably modified the conditions of human existence.
Opposed to this stereotype, is the view that man is pre-eminently a
mind-using, self-mastering animal; and the primary locus of all his activi-
9 Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture (New York, 1949). Also, more briefly
in "Four Stages in the Evolution of Minding," in Sol Tax (ed.), The Evolution of
Man (Chicago, 1960).
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 309
ties is his own organism.Until he had made somethingof himself, he
could makelittle of the world aroundhim.
In this process of self-discoveryand self-transformation,technics, in
the narrowsense,servedwell as a subsidiaryinstrument,but not as the
main operativeagent in man'sdevelopment;for technics was never till
our own age dissociatedfrom the largerculturalwhole in which man-
as man-has always functioned. Early man's original developmentwas
basedupon what AndreVaragnachappilycalled "the technology of the
body": the utilizationof man'shighly plastic bodily capacitiesfor the
expressionof his still unformedand uninformedmind,before that mind
had yet achieved,through the developmentof symbols and images,its
own more etherealizedtechnicalinstruments.'0From the beginning,the
creation of significantmodes of symbolic expression,ratherthan more
effective tools, was the basisof Homo sapiens'further development.In
approachingthis conclusion I happily find myself reaching,by a quite
independentroute, Levi-Strauss'sconceptionof culturaldeterminants."l
Unfortunately,so firmlywere the prevailingnineteenth-centurycon-
ceptions committedto the notion of man as primarilyHomo faber, the
tool-maker,rather than Homo sapiens, the mind-maker,that, as you
know, the first discovery of the art of the Altamiracaveswas dismissed
as a hoax becausethe leading paleo-ethnologistswould not admit that
the Ice Age hunters whose weapons and tools they had recently dis-
covered could have had either the leisure or the mental inclinationto
produceart-not crude forms,but imagesthat showed powers of obser-
vation and abstractionof a high order.But when we comparethe carv-
ings and paintingsof the Aurignacianor Magdalenianfinds with their
survivingtechnicalequipmentwho shallsay whetherit is art or technics
that shows the highest development?Even the finely finished Solutre
laurelleaf points were plainly a gift of aestheticallysensitiveartisansto
functionalefficiency.The Greek form for "technics"makesno distinc-
tion betweenindustrialproductionand symbolicart;and for the greater
part of humanhistory these aspectswere inseparable,one side respect-
ing objective conditionsand functions,the other respondingto subjec-
tive needs.
Our age hasnot yet overcomethe peculiarutilitarianbiasthat regards
technicalinventionas primaryand aestheticexpressionas secondaryor
superfluous;and this meansthat we have still to acknowledgethat tech-
nics derivesfrom the whole man, in his intercoursewith every part of
10Andre
Varagnac,De la Prehistoireau Monde Moderne: Essai d'une Anthropo-
dynamique (Paris, 1954).
11Claude Levi-Strauss,StructuralAnthropology (New York, 1963).
310 LewisMumford
the environment,utilizingevery aptitudein himselfto makethe most of
his own biological and ecological potentials.
Even at the earlieststage, trappingand foraging called less for tools
than for sharp observationof animalhabits and habitats,backed by a
wide experimentalsamplingof plantsanda shrewdinterpretationof the
effects of variousfoods, medicines,and poisonsupon the humanorgan-
ism. And in those horticulturaldiscoverieswhich, if Oakes Ames was
right,12must have preceded by many thousandsof years the active
domesticationof plants,taste and formal beauty played a part no less
than their food value; so that the earliestdomesticates,other than the
grains,were often valued for the color and form of their flowers, for
their perfume,their texture,their spiciness,ratherthanmerely for nour-
ishment.Edgar Anderson has suggested that the neolithic garden, like
the gardensin many simplerculturestoday, was probablya mixtureof
food plants,dye plants,and ornamentals-alltreatedas equallyessential
for life.13
Similarly,some of early man'smost daringtechnicalexperimentshad
nothing whateverto do with the masteryof the externalenvironment:
they were concernedwith the anatomicalmodificationor the superficial
decorationof the humanbody for sexual emphasis,self-expression,or
group identification.The Abbe Breuilfound evidence of such practices
as early as the Mousterianculture,which servedequallyin the develop-
ment of ornamentandsurgery.14Plainly,tools andweapons,so far from
dominatingman'stechnicalequipment,as the petrifiedartifactstoo glib-
ly suggested,constituteda smallpartof the biotechnicalassemblage;and
the strugglefor existence,though sometimessevere,did not engrossthe
energy and vitality of early man or divert him from his more central
need to bring orderandmeaninginto every part of his life. In thatlarger
effort, ritual, dance, song, painting, carving, and above all discursive
language-arts which utilize all the organs of the body-must have for
long played a decisiverole.
At its points of origin, then, technicswas relatedto the whole nature
of man, and that natureplayed a formativepart in the developmentof
every aspectof technology; thus, technicsat the beginningwas broadly
life-centered,not work-centeredor power-centered.As in all ecological
complexes, other human interests and purposes, other organic needs
restrainedthe overgrowthof any single component.As for the greatest
12Oakes Ames, Economic Annuals and Human Cultures
(Cambridge,1939).
13
Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man and Life (Boston, 1952).
14 Henri Breuil and Raymond Lantier, Les Hommes de la Pierre ancienne (Paris,
1951).
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 311
technicalfeat before our own age, the domesticationof plantsand ani-
mals,this advanceowed almostnothing to new tools, though it encour-
aged the developmentof clay containers.But it owed much, we now
begin to realize-since EduardHahn'5-to an intense subjectiveconcen-
trationupon sexualityin all its manifestations,abundantlyvisiblein cult
objects and symbolic art. Plant selection, hybridization,fertilization,
manuring,seeding,castrationwere the productsof an imaginativeculti-
vation of sexuality,whose first evidence one finds tens of thousandsof
years earlierin the emphaticallysexualcarvingsof Paleolithicwoman:
the so-calledVenuses.16
* * *

But at the point where history,in the form of the written record,be-
comes visible that life-centeredeconomy, a true polytechnics,was chal-
lenged and in part displacedin a series of radicaltechnical and social
innovations.About five thousandyears ago a monotechnicsdevoted to
the increase of power and wealth by the systematic organizationof
work-a-day activities in a rigidly mechanicalpattern came into exist-
ence. At this moment,a new conceptionof the natureof man aroseand
with it a new stressupon the exploitationof physical energies,cosmic
and human,apartfrom the processesof growth and reproduction,came
to the fore. In Egypt, Osirissymbolizesthe older,life-orientedtechnics:
Atum-Re, the sun-god,who characteristicallycreatedthe world out of
his own semen without female co-operation,stands for the machine-
centered one. The expansionof power, through ruthlesshuman coer-
cion and mechanicalorganization,took precedence over the enhance-
ment of life.
The chief markof this change was the constructionof the first com-
plex, high-poweredmachines;and therewith the beginning of a new
regimen,acceptedby all later civilized societies-though reluctantlyby
more archaiccultures-in which work at a single specializedtask,segre-
gated from other biologicaland social activities,not only occupied the
entire day, but increasinglyengrossedthe entire lifetime. That was the
fundamentaldeparturewhich, during the last few centuries,has led to
the increasingmechanizationand automationof all production.With
the assemblageof the first collective machines,work, by its systematic
dissociationfrom the rest of life, becamea curse, a burden,a sacrifice,a
form of punishment;and by reactionthis new regimensoon awakened
15Eduard Hahn, Das Alter der Wirtschaftlichen Kultur: Ein Ruckblick und ein
Ausblick (Heidelberg, 1905).
16 Gertrude R.
Levy, The Gate of Horn: A Study of the Religious Conceptions
of the Stone Age (London, 1948).
 312 Lewis Mumford

compensatorydreamsof effortlessaffluence,emancipatednot only from

slaverybut from work itself.
The machineI refer to was never discoveredin any archeologicaldig-
gings for a simple reason: it was composed almost entirely of human
parts.These partswere brought together in a hierarchicalorganization
under the rule of an absolutemonarchwhose commands,supportedby
a coalition of the priesthood,the armednobility, and the bureaucracy
secureda corpselikeobediencefrom all the componentsof the machine.
Let us call this archetypalmachine-the humanmodel for all later spe-
cializedmachines-the "Megamachine." This new kind of machinewas
far more complex than the contemporarypotter'swheel or bow-drill,
and it remainedthe most advancedtype of machineuntil the invention
of the mechanicalclock in the fourteenthcentury.
Only through the deliberateinvention of such a high-poweredma-
chine could the colossalworks of engineeringthat markedthe Pyramid
Age in both Egypt and Mesopotamiahave been broughtinto existence,
often in a single generation.This new technics came to an early climax
in the Great Pyramidat Giza. That structure,as J. H. Breastedpointed
out, exhibited a watch-maker'sstandardof exact measurement.17 By
operatingas a mechanicalunit, the 100,000men who worked on that
pyramid generated 10,000 horsepower;this human mechanismalone
made it possibleto raisethat colossalstructurewith the use of only the
simpleststone and copper tools-without the aid of such otherwisein-
dispensablemachinesas the wheel, the wagon, the pulley, the derrick,or
the winch.
Two things must be noted about this new mechanism,becausethey
identify it throughits historiccourse down to theh present.The first is
that the organizersof this machine derived their power and authority
from a cosmic source. The exactitude in measurement,the abstract
mechanical order, the compulsive regularity of this Megamachine
sprang directly from astronomicalobservationsand abstractscientific
calculations;this inflexible,predictableorder,incorporatedin the calen-
dar, was then transferredto the regimentationof the human compo-
nents. By a combinationof divine commandand ruthlessmilitary coer-
cion, a large population was made to endure grinding poverty and
forced labor at dull repetitivetasksin order to insure "life, prosperity,
and health"for the divineor semi-divinerulerand his entourage.
The second point is that the grave social defects of the human ma-
chine were partly offset by its superbachievementsin flood control and
grain production,which laid the ground for an enlargementin every
area of humanculture: in monumentalart, in codified law, and in
sys-
17
James Henry Breasted,The Conquest of Civilization (New York, 1926).
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 313
tematically pursued and permanently recorded thought. Such order,
such collective security and abundance as was achieved in Mesopotamia
and Egypt, later in India, China, in the Andean and Mayan cultures, was
never surpassed until the Megamachine was re-established in a new form
in our own time. But conceptually the machine was already detached
from other human functions and purposes than the increase of mechani-
cal power and order: with mordant symbolism, its ultimate products in
Egypt were tombs and mummies, while later in Assyria the chief testi-
monial to its efficiency was typically a waste of destroyed cities and
poisoned soils.
In a word, what modern economists lately termed the Machine Age
had its origin, not in the eighteenth century, but at the very outset of
civilization. All its salient characteristics were present from the begin-
ning in both the means and the ends of the collective Megamachine. So
Keynes's acute prescription of pyramid building as an essential means of
coping with the insensate productivity of a highly mechanized technol-
ogy applies both to the earliest manifestations and the present ones; for
what is a space rocket but the precise dynamic equivalent, in terms of
our present day theology and cosmology, of the static Egyptian pyra-
mid? Both are devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to
heaven for the favored few.
Unfortunately, though the labor machine lent itself to vast construc-
tive enterprises, which no small-scale community could even contem-
plate, much less execute, the most conspicuous result has been achieved
through military machines, in colossal acts of destruction and human
extermination, acts that monotonously soil the pages of history, from
the rape of Sumer to the blasting of Rotterdam and Hiroshima. Sooner
or later, I suggest, we must have the courage to ask ourselves: Is this
association of inordinate power and productivity with equally inordi-
nate violence and destruction a purely accidental one?
Now the misuse of Megamachines would have proved intolerable had
they not also brought genuine benefits to the whole community by
raising the ceiling of collective human effort and aspiration. The least of
these advantages was the gain in efficiency derived from concentration
upon rigorously repetitive motions in work, already indeed introduced
in the grinding and polishing processes of neolithic tool-making. This
inured civilized man to long spans of regular work, with higher pro-
ductive efficiency per unit. But the social by-product of this new disci-
pline was, perhaps, even more significant; for some of the psychological
benefits, hitherto confined to religious ritual, were transferred to work.
The sterile repetitive tasks imposed by the Megamachine, which in a
pathological form we associate with a compulsion neurosis, nevertheless
 314 Lewis Mumford

served, like all ritual and restrictiveorder, to lessen anxiety and to de-
fend the worker himselffrom the often demonicpromptingsof the un-
conscious,no longer held in check by the traditionsand customsof the
neolithic village.
In short,mechanizationandregimentation,throughlaborarmies,mili-
tary armies,and ultimatelythrough the derivativemodes of industrial
and bureaucraticorganization,supplementedand increasinglyreplaced
religiousritualas a meansof coping with anxietyand promotingpsychal
stabilityin masspopulations.Orderly,repetitivework provideda daily
means of self-control, more pervasive,more effective, more universal
than eitherritual or law. This hithertounnoticedpsychologicalcontri-
bution was a possibilitymore importantthan those gains in productive
efficiency which were too often offset by absolute losses in war and
conquest. Unfortunately, the ruling classes,which claimed immunity
from manuallabor,were not subjectto this discipline;hence, as the his-
toric record testifies,their disorderedfantasiestoo often found an outlet
in reality through destructionand extermination.

* * *

Having indicated the beginningsof this process, I must regrettably

pass over the actualinstitutionalforces that have been at work during
the last five thousandyears, and leap, all too suddenly,into the present
age, in which the ancient forms of biotechnics are being either sup-
pressedor supplanted,and in which the continued enlargementof the
Megamachineitself has become, with increasing compulsiveness,the
condition of scientificand technicaladvance,if not the mainpurposeof
humanexistence.But if the clues I havebeen attemptingto exposeprove
helpful, many aspects of the scientific and technical transformationof
the last three centurieswill call for reinterpretationand judiciousre-
consideration.For at the very least, we are now bound to explainwhy
the whole process of technical developmenthas become increasingly
coercive, totalitarian,and-subjectively speaking-compulsiveand irra-
tional.
Before acceptingthe ultimatetranslationof all organicprocesses,bio-
logical functions, and human aptitudesinto an externallycontrollable
mechanicalsystem, increasinglyautomaticand self-expanding,it might
be well to re-examinethe ideologicalfoundationsof this whole system,
with its concentrationupon centralizedpower and externalcontrol. We
must, in fact, ask ourselvesif the probabledestinationof this system is
compatiblewith the further developmentof specificallyhumanpoten-
tialities.
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 315
Consider the alternativesnow before us. If man were actually, as
currenttheory still supposes,a creaturewhose use of tools aloneplayed
the largestformativepartin his development,on what valid groundsdo
we now propose to strip mankindof the wide variety of autonomous
activitieshistoricallyassociatedwith agricultureand manufacture,leav-
ing the residualmass of workerswith the trivial task of watching but-
tons and dials and respondingto one-way communicationand remote
control? If man actually owes his intelligencemainly to his tool-using
propensities,by what logic do we now take his tools away, so that he
will become a functionless,worklessbeing, conditionedto accept only
what the Megamachineoffershim-an automatonwithin a largersystem
of automation,condemnedto compulsoryconsumption,as he was once
condemned to compulsory production?What in fact will be left of
human life if one function after another is either taken over by the
machineor else geneticallysuppressed,if not surgicallyremoved?
But if the analysis of human developmentin relation to technics
sketched out in this paper proves sound, there is an even more funda-
mental criticism to be made; for we must then go on to question the
present effort to shift the locus of human activity from the organic
environmentand the humangroup to the Megamachine,and eventually
reduce all forms of life and culture to those that can be translatedinto
the currentsystem of scientific abstractions,and transferredon a mass
basisto machinesand electronicapparatus.We are now in a positionto
question the dubious assumptionsthat have too long been treated as
axioms,for the system of thought upon which they are still basedante-
dated by three centuries anything like the present comprehension-
scientific, humanistic,and historic-of man's nature and special gifts.
From the PyramidAge to the so-calledNuclear Age, we note, the in-
ventorsand controllersof the Megamachinehave been hauntedby delu-
sions of omniscienceand omnipotence;and these delusionsare not less
irrationalnow that they have at their disposalall the formidablere-
sourcesof exact science and a high-energytechnology.
The Nuclear Age conception of "absolutepower" and infalliblein-
telligence, exercised by a military-scientificelite, correspondsto the
Bronze Age conception of Divine Kingship; and both belong to the
same infantile magico-religiousscheme as ritual human sacrifice. Liv-
ing organismscan use only limited amountsof energy, as living person-
alities can utilize only limited quantitiesof knowledge and experience.
"Too much" or "too little" is equally fatal to organic existence.Even
too much abstractknowledge,insulatedfrom feeling, from moralevalu-
ation, from historic experience,from responsiblepurposefulaction can
producea seriousunbalancein both the personalityand the community.
316 Lewis Mumford

Organisms,societies, humanpersonsare nothing less than delicate de-

vices for regulatingenergy and putting it at the service of life. To the
extent that our megatechnicsignoresthese fundamentalinsightsinto the
nature of organismsand human personalities,it is prescientificin its
attitudetoward the humanpersonality,even when not actively irration-
al. When the implicationsof this weaknessare taken in, a deliberate
large-scaledismantlingof the Megamachine,in all its institutionalforms,
must surely take place,with a redistributionof power and authorityto
smallerunits, under direct humancontrol.
If technics is to be brought back again into the service of human
culture, the path of advancewill lead, not to the further expansionof
the Megamachine,but to the development of all those parts of the
organic environmentand the human personalitythat have been sup-
pressedin orderto magnifythe officesof the pureintelligencealone and
therewith to maximizeits coercive collective exercise and quantitative
productivity.The deliberateexpressionand fulfilmentof humanpoten-
tialitiesrequiresa quite differentapproachfrom that bent solely on the
control of naturalforces and the modificationof humannaturein order
to facilitateand expandthe system of control. We know now that play
and sport and ritual and dream-fantasy,no less than organizedwork,
have exerciseda formativeinfluenceupon humancultureand even upon
technics.But make-believecannotfor long be a sufficientsubstitutefor
productivework; only when play and work form part of a larger cul-
turalwhole, as in Tolstoi'spictureof the mowersin Anna Karenina,can
the many-sidedrequirementsfor full humangrowth be satisfied.
Instead of liberation from work being the chief contribution of
mechanizationand automation,I would suggest that liberationfor work
-for educative,mind-formingwork, self-rewardingeven on the lowest
physiological level-may become the most salutory contribution of a
life-centeredtechnology. This may prove an indispensablecounterbal-
ance to universalautomation,partly by protectingthe displacedworker
from boredomand suicidaldesperation,only temporarilyrelievableby
anestheticsandsedatives,partlyby giving play to constructiveimpulses,
autonomousfunctions,meaningfulactivities.
Relieved from abject dependenceupon the Megamachine,the whole
world of biotechnicswill at once become open to man;and those parts
of his personalitythat have been crippled or paralyzedby insufficient
use should again come into play. Automationis indeed the proper end
of a purely mechanicalsystem; and in its place, subordinateto other
humanpurposes,automationwill serve the human community no less
effectively than the reflexes,the hormonesand autonomicnervoussys-
tem-nature's earliestexperimentin automation-servethe humanbody.
 Technicsand the Nature of Man 317
But autonomy is the proper end of organisms;and further technical
developmentmust aim at re-esetablishingautonomy at every stage of
humangrowth by giving play to every part of the humanpersonality,
not merely to those functionsthat serve the machine.
I realizethat in openingup these difficultquestionsI am not in a posi-
tion to provideready-madeanswers,nor do I suggest that such answers
will be easy to fabricate.But it is time that our presentwholesalecom-
mitmentto the machine,which ariseslargely out of our one-sidedinter-
pretationof man'searly technical development,should be replacedby
a fuller picture of both humannatureand the technical milieu,as both
have evolved together.