11 JANUARY 1935, Page 22

The Nature of Technics •

I AM shy of .a method by which this book may be reviewed. To discuss it as dialectic, or history, or ethics, would be to transfer the reviewer's preferred limitation of interest to the work itself. To begin by calling it—and it may justly be called—the most important sociological work in English this century (the work of Sombart alone confines the compliment to our own language) is helpless as appraisal though it may be the bravest way of inciting popular reading. And it would be grossly unjust to any real digest of Mr. Mumford's work to blur its summary and interpretation. I can think of only one responsible way : it is to print his own final summary ; to list the stages of his argument, chiefly to show what the book is not ; then to isolate a method of criticism and confess that the author is being appreciated on that level alone.

Towards the end of the last chapter we find :

" We have seen the machine arise out of the denial of the organic and the living, and we have in turn marked the reaction of the organic and the living upon the machine. This reaction has two forms. One of them, the use of mechanical means to return to the primitive, means a throwback to lower levels of thought and emotion which will ultimately lead to the destruction of the machine itself and the higher types of life that have gone into its conception. The other involves the rebuilding of the individual

personality and the collective group, and the reorientation of all forms of thought and social activity toward life : this second reaction promises to transform the nature and function of our mechanical environment and to lay wider and firmer and safer foundations for human society at large."

A less trite record of these changes could not be imagined. We have been prepared by some of the four hundred authorities in four languages whom Mr. Mumford serenely reviews in his bibliography, to begin humbly and enquiringly with the clock and the Arabs and to end vainly and com- placently with television or the death ray. Mr. Mumford on the contrary first identifies the human impulses that required satisfying with machines. He then proceeds to examine the institutions that by denying the necessity of organic life helped the advance of the machine, namely, the monastery, the mine, and the battlefield. In the fine se:lion on " the Obstacle of Animism," he shows that up to the sixteenth century practically the only invention that triumphed in the face of animistic thinking was the wheel. He is led to his first primary conclusion—that man himself is the natural model for the machine but that the most ineffective kind of machine is the realistic mechanical imitation of a man or other animal. The central part of the book examines the social and cultural habits that produced the three phases of technics. These are the eotechnic, founded on power-machinery, during which technics were meant to intensify the experience of the senses ; the paleotechnic, depending on the mine, the British nineteenth-century contribution of " multiplying and vulgarizing " production —still with us but exhausted and discounted in Germany, England, the United States, happily skipped by Holland and Denmark, now at its peak in Japan and China ; finally the neotechnics phase, provoked by the electric cell and the dynamo, into which—we must hope—we are now free to move. In his last and most ambitious chapter, " Orienta- tion," he undertakes to provide the modern phase with an ideology, a little spitefully salvaging us from what, under the spell of Veblen, he is too often pleased to see as ".pecuniary reputability."

To interpret Mr. Mumford's achievement on the single level of Definition will not show the comprehensiveness

of his mind, but it may-give sharp glimpses of its invention. Beginning by making precise distinctions between machine, tool, utensil, apparatus and utility, he is soon able for many human spheres of living to establish " mode " and " mech- anism " as synonyms—in sex living, for instance. He has Mr. Havelock Ellis's gift of destroying an attitude by com- bining two of its truisms and revealing a surprising opinion. I recall, for example, Mr. Ellis's definition of anti-vivisection crusades as " morbid humanitarianism." By a similar clarity and interpretative force, Mr. Mumford climbs through

familiar hierarchies of ideas about technics and leaves them *ithbut regret to achieVe a new, acute conclusion. By such steps, he defmes sport in the modern world as " one of the least effective resistances to the machine " ; the primitive as " a sterile absolute of the organic" ; and the same account of a concept of space explains at the same time the cartography of the middle ages and their indifference to anachronism. His hopes for the present era are equally original and vital—they are. that with the assimilation of the machine we shall be able to purify aesthetics and de- valuate social caste.

It is impossible in so skimped a review to give any notion of the scale and quality of Mr. Mumford's book. Only by the mischievous comparison of reputations can one begin to do it. He himself anticipates those comparisons : they are with Sombart and Veblen, to whom he confesses his debt, as well as to his more personal teacher Geddes. But unfortunately to the lay reader a lesser name, more powerful in Europe, will dispute with Mr. Mumford the right to diagnose and dictate. It is the name of Spengler. Spengler, then, in Man and Technics, is the professional mystic throwing off a damaging little essay on a topic about which he feels he ought to hold vital beliefs ; Technics and Civilization is the imperative work of a man naturally apt and trained specially for a decade to make this his life work. As a propagandist merely, Mr. Mumford might be said to be for our age what Mr. Shaw was for his, were this not unfair to Shaw's reputation, unfair to Mumford's status and to the status of

a man like, say, Mr. J. A. Hobson. I can think of no parallel in contemporary social philosophy. Over all the sociological writers of the nineteenth century Mr. Mumford has two vital advantages, the advantages of time and place : I mean the advantages of ideogram over rhetoric ; and the advantage of American over European.

That last advantage, the peculiarly American qualities that make this a unique work—may be summed as : the journalistic fusion of energy and disinterestedness, what makes their foreign correspondence more literate than our own ; inexhaustible and accurate reading ; an unconcern for the " right use of leisure " theory, the nineteenth-century's rationalization of why it is dignified to retire on a " com- petence " ; and finally a natural and triumphant inability to assume our characteristic island coyness in accepting the world of technics, a universe dating not from the eighteenth century, nor even from the last war, but 'fitim about the middle -of the eleventh century.

ALISTAIR COORRt-