Technopoly (4 page)

Having defined tool-using cultures in this manner, I must add two points so as to avoid excessive oversimplification. First, the quantity of technologies available to a tool-using culture is not its defining characteristic. Even a superficial study of the Roman Empire, for example, reveals the extent to which it relied on roads, bridges, aqueducts, tunnels, and sewers for both its economic vitality and its military conquests. Or, to take another example, we know that, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Europe underwent a technological boom: medieval man was surrounded by machines.
³
One may even go as far as Lynn White, Jr., who said that the Middle Ages gave us for the first time in history “a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power.”
⁴
Tool-using cultures, in other words, may be both ingenious and productive in solving problems of the physical environment. Windmills were invented in the late twelfth century. Eyeglasses for nearsightedness appeared in Italy in 1280. The invention in the eleventh century of rigid padded collars to rest on the shoulder blades of horses solved the problem of how to increase the pulling power of horses without decreasing their ability to breathe. In fact, as early as the ninth century in Europe, horseshoes were invented, and someone figured out that, when horses are hitched, one behind the other, their pulling power is enormously amplified. Corn mills, paper mills, and fulling mills were part of medieval culture, as were bridges, castles, and cathedrals. The famous spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, built in the thirteenth century, rose to a height of 466 feet, the equivalent of a forty-story skyscraper. And, to go further back in time, one must not fail to mention the remarkable engineering achievements of Stonehenge and the Pyramids (whose construction,
Lewis Mumford insisted, signifies the first example of a megamachine in action).

Given the facts, we must conclude that tool-using cultures are not necessarily impoverished technologically, and may even be surprisingly sophisticated. Of course, some tool-using cultures were (and still are) technologically primitive, and some have even displayed a contempt for crafts and machinery. The Golden Age of Greece, for example, produced no important technical inventions and could not even devise ways of using horsepower efficiently. Both Plato and Aristotle scorned the “base mechanic arts,” probably in the belief that nobility of mind was not enhanced by efforts to increase efficiency or productivity. Efficiency and productivity were problems for slaves, not philosophers. We find a somewhat similar view in the Bible, which is the longest and most detailed account of an ancient tool-using culture we have. In Deuteronomy, no less an authority than God Himself says, “Cursed be the man who makes a graven or molten image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.”

Tool-using cultures, then, may have many tools or few, may be enthusiastic about tools or contemptuous. The name “tool-using culture” derives from the relationship in a given culture between tools and the belief system or ideology. The tools are not intruders. They are integrated into the culture in ways that do not pose significant contradictions to its world-view. If we take the European Middle Ages as an example of a tool-using culture, we find a very high degree of integration between its tools and its world-view. Medieval theologians developed an elaborate and systematic description of the relation of man to God, man to nature, man to man, and man to his tools. Their theology took as a first and last principle that all knowledge and goodness come from God, and that therefore all human enterprise
must be directed toward the service of God. Theology, not technology, provided people with authorization for what to do or think. Perhaps this is why Leonardo da Vinci kept his design of a submarine secret, believing that it was too harmful a tool to unleash, that it would not gain favor in God’s eyes.

In any case, theological assumptions served as a controlling ideology, and whatever tools were invented had, ultimately, to fit within that ideology. We may say, further, that all tool-using cultures—from the technologically most primitive to the most sophisticated—are theocratic or, if not that, unified by some metaphysical theory. Such a theology or metaphysics provides order and meaning to existence, making it almost impossible for technics to subordinate people to its own needs.

The “almost” is important. It leads to my second qualification. As the spirit of Thamus reminds us, tools have a way of intruding on even the most unified set of cultural beliefs. There are limits to the power of both theology and metaphysics, and technology has business to do which sometimes cannot be stayed by any force. Perhaps the most interesting example of a drastic technological disruption of a tool-using culture is in the eighth-century use of the stirrup by the Franks under the leadership of Charles Martel. Until this time, the principal use of horses in combat was to transport warriors to the scene of the battle, whereupon they dismounted to meet the foe. The stirrup made it possible to fight
on
horseback, and this created an awesome new military technology: mounted shock combat. The new form of combat, as Lynn White, Jr., has meticulously detailed, enlarged the importance of the knightly class and changed the nature of feudal society.
⁵
Landholders found it necessary to secure the services of cavalry for protection. Eventually, the knights seized control of church lands and distributed them to vassals on condition that they stay in the service of the knights. If a pun will be allowed here, the stirrup was in the
saddle, and took feudal society where it would not otherwise have gone.

To take a later example: I have already alluded to the transformation of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century from an instrument of religious observance to an instrument of commercial enterprise. That transformation is sometimes given a specific date—1370—when King Charles V ordered all citizens of Paris to regulate their private, commercial, and industrial life by the bells of the Royal Palace clock, which struck every sixty minutes. All churches in Paris were similarly required to regulate their clocks, in disregard of the canonical hours. Thus, the church had to give material interests precedence over spiritual needs. Here is a clear example of a tool being employed to loosen the authority of the central institution of medieval life.

There are other examples of how technologies created problems for the spiritual life of medieval Europe. For example, the mills to which farmers flocked to have their grain ground became a favorite place for prostitutes to attract customers. The problem grew to such proportions that Saint Bernard, the leader of the Cistercian order in the twelfth century, tried to close down the mills. He was unsuccessful, because the mills had become too important to the economy. In other words, it is something of an oversimplification to say that tool-using cultures never had their customs and symbolic life reoriented by technology. And, just as there are examples of such cases in the medieval world, we can find queer but significant instances in technologically primitive societies of tools attacking the supremacy of custom, religion, or metaphysics. Egbert de Vries, a Dutch sociologist, has told of how the introduction of matches to an African tribe altered their sexual habits.
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Members of this community believed it necessary to start a new fire in the fireplace after each act of sexual intercourse. This custom meant that each act of intercourse was something of a public event,
since when it was completed someone had to go to a neighboring hut to bring back a burning stick with which to start a fresh fire. Under such conditions, adultery was difficult to conceal, which is conceivably why the custom originated in the first place. The introduction of matches changed all this. It became possible to light a new fire without going to a neighbor’s hut, and thus, in a flash, so to speak, a long-standing tradition was consumed. In reporting on de Vries’ finding, Alvin Toffler raises several intriguing questions: Did matches result in a shift in values? Was adultery less or more frowned upon as a result? By facilitating the privacy of sex, did matches alter the valuation placed upon it? We can be sure that some changes in cultural values occurred, although they could not have been as drastic as what happened to the Ihalmiut tribe early in the twentieth century, after the introduction of the rifle. As described by Farley Mowat in
The People of the Deer
, the replacement of bows and arrows with rifles is one of the most chilling tales on record of a technological attack on a tool-using culture. The result in this case was not the modification of a culture but its eradication.

Nonetheless, after one acknowledges that no taxonomy ever neatly fits the realities of a situation, and that in particular the definition of a tool-using culture lacks precision, it is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to
become
the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.

The modern technocracies of the West have their roots in the medieval European world, from which there emerged three great inventions: the mechanical clock, which provided a new conception
of time; the printing press with movable type, which attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition; and the telescope, which attacked the fundamental propositions of Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relationship between tools and culture. But since it is permissible to say that among faith, hope, and charity the last is most important, I shall venture to say that among the clock, the press, and the telescope the last is also the most important. To be more exact (since Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and to some extent Kepler did their work without benefit of the telescope), somewhat cruder instruments of observation than the telescope allowed men to see, measure, and speculate about the heavens in ways that had not been possible before. But the refinements of the telescope made their knowledge so precise that there followed a collapse, if one may say it this way, of the moral center of gravity in the West. That moral center had allowed people to believe that the earth was the stable center of the universe and therefore that humankind was of special interest to God. After Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in some hidden corner of the universe, and this left the Western world to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. Although John Milton was only an infant when Galileo’s
Messenger from the Stars
was printed in 1610, he was able, years later, to describe the psychic desolation of an unfathomable universe that Galileo’s telescopic vision thrust upon an unprepared theology. In
Paradise Lost
, Milton wrote:

Truly, a paradise lost. But it was not Galileo’s intention—neither was it Copernicus’ or Kepler’s—to so disarm their culture.
These were medieval men who, like Gutenberg before them, had no wish to damage the spiritual foundations of their world. Copernicus, for example, was a doctor of canon law, having been elected a canon of Frauenburg Cathedral. Although he never took a medical degree, he studied medicine, was private physician to his uncle, and among many people was better known as a physician than as an astronomer. He published only one scientific work,
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
, the first completed copy arriving from the printer only a few hours before his death, at the age of seventy, on May 24, 1543. He had delayed publishing his heliocentric theory for thirty years, largely because he believed it to be unsound, not because he feared retribution from the church. In fact, his book was not placed on the Index until seventy-three years after it was published, and then only for a short time. (Galileo’s trial did not take place until ninety years after Copernicus’ death.) In 1543, scholars and philosophers had no reason to fear persecution for their ideas so long as they did not directly challenge the authority of the church, which Copernicus had no wish to do. Though the authorship of the preface to his work is in dispute, the preface clearly indicates that his ideas are to be taken as hypotheses, and that his “hypotheses need not be true or even probable.” We can be sure that Copernicus believed that the earth really moved, but he did not believe that either the earth or the planets moved in the manner described in his system, which he understood to consist of geometric fictions. And he did not believe that his work undermined the supremacy of theology. It is true that Martin Luther called Copernicus “a fool who went against Holy Writ,” but Copernicus did not think he had done so—which proves, I suppose, that Luther saw more deeply than Copernicus.

Kepler’s is a somewhat similar story. Born in 1571, he began his career by publishing astrological calendars, and ended it as court astrologer to the duke of Wallenstein. Although he was
famous for his service as an astrologer, we must credit him with believing that “Astrology can do enormous harm to a monarch if a clever astrologer exploits his human credulity.” Kepler wished astrology to be kept out of sight of all heads of state, a precaution that in recent years has not always been taken. His mother was accused of being a witch, and although Kepler did not believe this specific charge, he would probably not have denied categorically the existence of witches. He spent a great deal of his time corresponding with scholars on questions concerning chronology in the age of Christ, and his theory that Jesus was actually born in 4 or 5
B.C
. is generally accepted today. In other words, Kepler was very much a man of his time, medieval through and through. Except for one thing: He believed that theology and science should be kept separate and, in particular, that angels, spirits and the opinions of saints should be banished from cosmology. In his
New Astronomy
, he wrote, “Now as regards the opinions of the saints about these matters of nature, I answer in one word, that in theology the weight of authority, but in philosophy the weight of Reason alone is valid.” After reviewing what various saints had said about the earth, Kepler concluded, “… but to me more sacred than all these is Truth, when I, with all respect for the doctors of the Church, demonstrate from philosophy that the earth is round, circumhabited by antipodes, of a most insignificant smallness, and a swift wanderer among the stars.”