Technopoly (6 page)

Say only, “It is here.” But when did “here” begin? When did Bacon’s ideology become a reality? When, to use Siegfried Giedion’s phrase, did mechanization take command? To be cautious about it, we might locate the emergence of the first true technocracy in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century—let us say with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765. From that time forward, a decade did not pass without the invention of some significant machinery which, taken together, put an end to medieval “manufacture” (which once meant “to make by hand”). The practical energy and technical skills unleashed at this time changed forever the material and psychic environment of the Western world.

An equally plausible date for the beginnings of technocracy (and, for Americans, easier to remember) is 1776, when Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
was published. As Bacon was no scientist, Smith was no inventor. But, like Bacon, he provided a theory that gave conceptual relevance and credibility to the direction in which human enterprise was pointed. Specifically,
he justified the transformation from small-scale, personalized, skilled labor to large-scale, impersonal, mechanized production. He not only argued convincingly that money, not land, was the key to wealth, but gave us his famous principle of the self-regulating market. In a technocracy—that is, a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent—an “unseen hand” will eliminate the incompetent and reward those who produce cheaply and well the goods that people want. It was not clear then, and still isn’t, whose unseen mind guides the unseen hand, but it is possible (the technocratic industrialists believed) that God could have something to do with it. And if not God, then “human nature,” for Adam Smith had named our species “Economic Man,” born with an instinct to barter and acquire wealth.

In any case, toward the end of the eighteenth century, technocracy was well underway, especially after Richard Arkwright, a barber by trade, developed the factory system. In his cotton-spinning mills, Arkwright trained workers, mostly children, “to conform to the regular celerity of the machine,” and in doing so gave an enormous boost to the growth of modern forms of technocratic capitalism. In 1780, twenty factories were under his control, for which a grateful nation knighted him, and from which an equally grateful son inherited a fortune. Arkwright may fairly be thought of as the first—even archetypal—technocratic capitalist. He exemplified in every particular the type of nineteenth-century entrepreneur to come. As Siegfried Giedion has described him, Arkwright created the first mechanization of production “[in] a hostile environment, without protectors, without government subsidy, but nourished by a relentless utilitarianism that feared no financial risk or danger.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, England was spawning such entrepreneurs in every major city. By 1806, the concept of the power loom, introduced by Edmund Cartwright (a clergyman no less), was revolutionizing the textile industry by eliminating,
once and for all, skilled workers, replacing them with workers who merely kept the machines operating.

By 1850, the machine-tool industry was developed—machines to make machines. And beginning in the 1860s, especially in America, a collective fervor for invention took hold of the masses. To quote Giedion again: “Everyone invented, whoever owned an enterprise sought ways and means to make his goods more speedily, more perfectly, and often of improved beauty. Anonymously and inconspicuously the old tools were transformed into modern instruments.”
¹
Because of their familiarity, it is not necessary to describe in detail all of the inventions of the nineteenth century, including those which gave substance to the phrase “communications revolution”: the photograph and telegraph (1830s), rotary-power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), the transatlantic cable (1866), the telephone (1876), motion pictures and wireless telegraphy (1895). Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned
how
to invent things, and the question of
why
we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that is to say, as markets.

Not everyone agreed, of course, especially with the last notion. In England, William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills” which stripped men of their souls. Matthew Arnold warned that “faith in machinery” was mankind’s greatest menace. Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris railed against the spiritual degradation brought by industrial progress. In France,
Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola documented in their novels the spiritual emptiness of “Economic man” and the poverty of the acquisitive impulse.

The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of “utopian” communities, of which perhaps the most famous is Robert Owen’s experimental community in Scotland called New Lanark. There, he established a model factory community, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, and innovative education for the children of workers. In 1824, Owen came to America and founded another utopia at New Harmony, Indiana. Although none of his or other experiments endured, dozens were tried in an effort to reduce the human costs of a technocracy.
²

We also must not omit mentioning the rise and fall of the much-maligned Luddite Movement. The origin of the term is obscure, some believing that it refers to the actions of a youth named Ludlum who, being told by his father to fix a weaving machine, proceeded instead to destroy it. In any case, between 1811 and 1816, there arose widespread support for workers who bitterly resented the new wage cuts, child labor, and elimination of laws and customs that had once protected skilled workers. Their discontent was expressed through the destruction of machines, mostly in the garment and fabric industry; since then the term “Luddite” has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology. But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.
³

They lost. So did all the other nineteenth-century nay-sayers. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton might well have been on their side. Perhaps Bacon as well, for it was not his intention that technology should be a blight or a destroyer. But then, Bacon’s greatest deficiency had always been that he was unfamiliar
with the legend of Thamus; he understood nothing of the dialectic of technological change, and said little about the negative consequences of technology. Even so, taken as a whole, the rise of technocracy would probably have pleased Bacon, for there can be no disputing that technocracy transformed the face of material civilization, and went far toward relieving what Tocqueville called “the disease of work.” And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and even convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine. To take only one example of the last point, the list of nineteenth-century contributors to
The Saturday Evening Post
, founded in 1821, included William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe—in other words, most of the writers presently included in American Lit. 101. The technocratic culture eroded the line that had made the intellectual interests of educated people inaccessible to the working class, and we may take it as a fact, as George Steiner has remarked, that the period from the French Revolution to World War I marked an oasis of quality in which great literature reached a mass audience.

Something else reached a mass audience as well: political and religious freedom. It would be an inadmissible simplification to claim that the Age of Enlightenment originated solely because of the emerging importance of technology in the eighteenth century, but it is quite clear that the great stress placed on
individuality in the economic sphere had an irresistible resonance in the political sphere. In a technocracy, inherited royalty is both irrelevant and absurd. The new royalty was reserved for men like Richard Arkwright, whose origins were low but whose intelligence and daring soared. Those possessed of such gifts could not be denied political power and were prepared to take it if it were not granted. In any case, the revolutionary nature of the new means of production and communication would have naturally generated radical ideas in every realm of human enterprise. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the world. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. There were empires to build, opportunities to exploit, exciting freedoms to enjoy, especially in America. There, on the wings of technocracy, the United States soared to unprecedented heights as a world power. That Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would have found such a place uncomfortable, perhaps even disagreeable, did not matter. Nor did it matter that there were nineteenth-century American voices—Thoreau, for example—who complained about what was being left behind. The first answer to the complaints was, We leave nothing behind but the chains of a tool-using culture. The second answer was more thoughtful: Technocracy will not overwhelm us. And this was true, to a degree. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic worlds. Technocracy subordinated these worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, there still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was
possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible.

The technocracy that emerged, fully armed, in nineteenth-century America disdained such beliefs, because holy men and sin, grandmothers and families, regional loyalties and two-thousand-year-old traditions, are antagonistic to the technocratic way of life. They are a troublesome residue of a tool-using period, a source of criticism of technocracy. They represent a thought-world that stands apart from technocracy and rebukes it—rebukes its language, its impersonality, its fragmentation, its alienation. And so technocracy disdains such a thought-world but, in America, did not and could not destroy it.

We may get a sense of the interplay between technocracy and Old World values in the work of Mark Twain, who was fascinated by the technical accomplishments of the nineteenth century. He said of it that it was “the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen,” and he once congratulated Walt Whitman on having lived in the age that gave the world the beneficial products of coal tar. It is often claimed that he was the first writer regularly to use a typewriter, and he invested (and lost) a good deal of money in new inventions. In his
Life on the Mississippi
, he gives lovingly detailed accounts of industrial development, such as the growth of the cotton mills in Natchez:

Twain liked nothing better than to describe the giantism and ingenuity of American industry. But at the same time, the totality of his work is an affirmation of preindustrial values. Personal loyalty, regional tradition, the continuity of family life, the relevance of the tales and wisdom of the elderly are the soul of his work throughout. The story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim making their way to freedom on a raft is nothing less than a celebration of the enduring spirituality of pretechnological man.

If we ask, then, why technocracy did not destroy the world-view of a tool-using culture, we may answer that the fury of industrialism was too new and as yet too limited in scope to alter the needs of inner life or to drive away the language, memories, and social structures of the tool-using past. It was possible to contemplate the wonders of a mechanized cotton mill without believing that tradition was entirely useless. In reviewing nineteenth-century American history, one can hear the groans of religion in crisis, of mythologies under attack, of a politics and education in confusion, but the groans are not yet death-throes. They are the sounds of a culture in pain, and nothing more. The ideas of tool-using cultures were, after all, designed to address questions that still lingered in a technocracy. The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to the philosophies of their fathers. They could not convince themselves that religion, as Freud summed it up at the beginning of the twentieth century, is nothing but an obsessional neurosis. Nor could they quite believe, as the new cosmology taught, that the universe is the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. And they continued to believe, as Mark Twain did, that, for all their dependence on machinery, tools
ought still to be their servants, not their masters. They would allow their tools to be presumptuous, aggressive, audacious, impudent servants, but that tools should rise above their servile station was an appalling thought. And though technocracy found no clear place for the human soul, its citizens held to the belief that no increase in material wealth would compensate them for a culture that insulted their self-respect.