Roots and Machines
Monday night at operations control
I sat facing rows of monitor mountains
Mind control
Life control
Operation Mind Control
It is no accident American politics and just as clearly global politics offer little insight for our times. Contemporary politics are archaic, maybe at best anachronistic, not of the era. Less surprising, various reactionary elements provide the only traditional political movement. As in previous historical eras, such a situation didn’t suddenly appear. It’s been in the works for decades, it could very well be argued for centuries.
Over the last two centuries, technology defined the politics of modernity, despite the fact we have no politics of technology. Technology continues to be perceived as some politically inert element. Economic myths and other illusory explanations of power were developed for new technological infrastructures controlled by a small number of very real, very large, very powerful corporations. In every way, politics failed to evolve with our not well thought new technological ecologies.
Nonetheless, across the 20th century this technological change, its causes and impacts, were noticed and documented. Any number of thinkers – Thorstein Veblen, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Norbert Wiener, Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan, and Ivan Illich to name a few – came to understand our established politics and many institutions were becoming irrelevant, except maybe as technological handmaidens.
Today, these 20th century figures hold in common their thinking on these matters were largely ignored and are now mostly forgotten. Not coincidentally, their thinking offered alternatives to many established myths concerning the evolution of technological power. It is thinking that remains as relevant today as it was a century or half-century ago. Thinking that can still help provide a more vibrant future as ever faster developing technological forces threaten to not liberate, but enslave.
With this short piece, I’ll attempt to combine some of the thinking of two lost figures of this era, French citizen Simone Weil and American historian Lewis Mumford. For the few familiar with either, this might seem a rather curios combination, though their similarities will be surprising. However, it should not be too surprising considering both were mostly of the same era, historically aware, and completely familiar with the science revolutionizing human understanding and existence with its resultant technology.
I’ll focus on two books: Weil’s The Need for Roots written in 1943, right before her young death at 34 and Mumford’s second volume of The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power released in 1970, when he was 75. Both works deserve extensive stand alone reviews, however pulling from both several complementary thoughts offers valuable political insight. With a great understanding of history and the then recent scientific revolutions of natural selection and quantum physics, Weil seeks and in sublime ways succeeds incorporating them together into her political thinking. Mumford, a historian of technology, incorporates technology into his political thinking. Both are not simply advocates of democracy and its inherently decentralized social order, but consider democratic order essential for humanity’s future.
The Need for Roots was written two and half-years into the German occupation of France. It includes an excellent history of France as model of nationalism’s bloody, mindless birth, and its centuries later logical culmination in National Socialist Germany. Political decadence pervaded the centuries long experiment of French nationalism leading in the early 20th century to “the whole series of political institutions (being) the object of disgust, derision and disdain. The very word politics had taken on a profoundly pejorative meaning incredible in a democracy. ‘Oh, he’s a politician,’ ‘all that, that’s just politics’.” In the summer of 1940, France’s instantaneous surrender was no collapse, but a continuum of an inherently dysfunctional politics.
The incredible thing about Weil’s book is not only the thinking on what brought Europe, and indeed the world, to shared calamity, but her focus on change and moving beyond. With German boots traipsing the Champs-Élysées, Weil treats the Occupation as temporary, to be transcended, as she sharply contemplates questions of what's next.
Weil begins, “Order is the first need of all; it even stands above all needs properly so-called. To be able to conceive it, we must know what the other needs are.” This is an astoundingly astute understanding. Homo sapiens are social animals. Social order is fundamental to our being. Social organization is politics. Today, any and all healthy politics concern reordering.
A second thought is directly connected to the first, “One of the indispensable foods of the human soul is liberty. Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. We must understand by that, of course, a real ability. Wherever men are living in community, rules imposed in the common interest must necessarily limit the possibilities of choice.”
Liberty is the ability to choose and she stresses “a real ability to choose.” This was written in response to a century and half of industrialism and the creation of mass social order, an order inundated not by real but artificial choices overwhelming concerning consumption. Real choices concern the ordering of society, choices the modern individual became as disenfranchised from as the past’s European and Chinese peasantry. Weil importantly notes as social beings our “common interest” necessitates certain individual limits. Weil, an ancient democrat, attunes this seemingly contradictory order of the free individual and the limiting social whole with the insistence the equal voice and actions of each citizen create common interest.
Order, the organization of power, is fundamental politics. It defines liberty. In the words of Weil, liberty is soul food. All social aspects of human life are ordered in some way. Democratic order requires the ability for each individual to play an equal part defining the social. Democratic order needs to be distributed, power decentralized, facilitating individual choice. Two and half-centuries into industrialism, power structures, both private and public, are more centralized than any time in history. Individual choices are largely illusory.
In The Myth of the Machine, Mumford documents how from its inception, technology has played a role establishing social order. With industrialism, technology came to play a completely definitive role. We have come to a technological ordering of society where only the technologist, corporation, and increasingly the technologies themselves have a say, a choice. Individual choice, Weil’s liberty, is of no importance. Mumford writes, “Have we not already evidence to show that science as technology may, through its inordinate growth, become increasingly irrelevant to any human intent whatever, except that of the technologist or the corporate enterprise.”
He continues, “Whatever the advantage of a highly organized system in mechanical production, based on non-human sources of power — and as everyone recognizes there are many advantages – the system itself tends to grow more rigid, more inadaptable, more dehumanized in proportion to the completeness of its automation and its extrusion of the worker from the process of production.”
Not only is the individual disenfranchised, but established technologies constrain the choice of the technologist and corporation. Adopted technologies themselves constrain choice on future technological development. Presently, the best example of this is compute architecture’s dependence on centralized servers. It is not simply modes of production that become rigid, inadaptable and dehumanized, but the social whole they create.
Today, thoughtless automation of all aspects of society is uninfluenced by Mumford’s understanding that as “the system of automation becomes more highly articulated, and thereby more self-sufficient and self-enclosed, it is less possible for anyone to intervene in the process, to alter its pace, to change its direction, to limit its further extension, or to reorient its goal. The larger automated system becomes increasingly rigid…automation, in this final form, is an attempt to exercise control, not only of the mechanical process itself, but of the human being who once directed it: turning him from an active to a passive agent and finally in eliminating him altogether.”
This automation of society needs no equivalence of human or godlike intelligence, it simply requires an entrenched, centralized technological infrastructure. The technology creates its own social order stripping away individual choice, human liberty. Technology becomes master and our Tech Overlords, as all liberty quashing tyrants of the past, think this a good thing. In regards to new technology adopted upon on an already entrenched technological infrastructure, “the obstacles to immediate acceptance (ie choice) are broken down and the latest technical proposal, instead of having to establish its right to be recognized and accepted, rather challenges society to take it over at once, and at any cost; whilst any reluctance to do so immediately is looked upon as reprehensible.”
Mumford adds, “The notion that automation gives any guarantee of human liberation is a piece of wishful thinking.”
With industrialism, choice in regards to both individual and societal order, Weil’s fundamental liberty, was removed from the individual’s hands. She writes, “The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it. The rationalized factory, where a man finds himself shorn, in the interests of a passive mechanism, of everything which makes for initiative, intelligence, knowledge, method, is as it were an image of our present-day society. For the bureaucratic machine, though composed of flesh, and of well fed flesh at that, is none the less as irresponsible and as soulless as are machines made of iron and steel. The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such.”
Today, administrative bureaucracy becomes increasingly automated, just as assuredly subsuming individual choice. Weil pinpoints the power in the machine, “In almost all fields, the individual, shut in within the bounds of a limited proficiency, finds himself caught up in a whole which is beyond him, by which he must regulate all his activity, and whose functioning he is unable to understand. In such a situation, there is one function which takes on a supreme importance, namely, that which consists simply in co-ordinating; we may call it the administrative or bureaucratic function.” With industrialism, political choice became subjugated to bureaucratic order. Bureaucracy is too often decried as an exclusive fault of government, but it is also the scourge of our mega-corporations.
Mumford notes the stranglehold of corporate organization impacts science itself,
“The corporate scientific personality has thus taken over the attributes of the individual thinker and as science comes more and more to rely for its results upon complicated and extremely expensive apparatus, like computers, cyclotrons, electronic microscope, and nuclear piles, no work along present lines can be done without close attachment to a well endowed corporate organization.”
Human choice is necessarily social, an individual is always part of a greater whole. Today, the individual has little ability to influence the social whole, such choice is largely in the hands of a few atop massive bureaucratic corporate structures. The only political organization humanity’s ever conceived allowing individual influence of the social whole is democracy. To establish democracy in the 21st century and beyond requires a complete reorganization of the structure and processes of the corporation and government with an understanding any and all technologies are essential aspects of this organization. It would seem obvious to state, but it seems to be not at all, democracy requires democratic order, including of technology itself. Such technological choices are always ours to make. "It is an error to believe that the impetus behind the system is uncheckable, because it represents a cosmic force that can neither be defied or controlled.” (Mumford)
Yet, we remain completely enthralled, beholden, and captured by our technology. We are lectured by technologists and big money interests there is only one determined future. This is simply not true, nor is their future a particularly attractive one. Measured in terms of human liberty, it looks to be one of the most oppressive regimes ever conceived. Just as importantly, it completely severs all roots to the past, creating new and entirely artificial environments. In comparison to biological evolution, there is no selection process beyond misguided, destructive, and unquenchable avarice. Politically, there are neither the processes or institutions, the political order, to in any way, let’s use that rather quaint notion of America's founders, check and balance the power of technology.
Weil was one of the most original political thinkers of the 20th century. She requires careful reading to catch her sublimely incorporated understandings of physics and other sciences in her political thought. In regards to political choice, she incorporates natural selection,
“These conditions of existence are determined in the first place, as in the case of living beings, on the one hand by the natural environment and on the other hand by the existence, activity and especially competition of other organisms of the same species, that is to say here of other social groups. But still a third factor enters into play, namely, the organization of the natural environment, capital equipment, armaments, methods of work and of warfare; and this factor occupies a special position owing to the fact that, though it acts upon the form of social organization, it in turn undergoes the latter’s reaction upon it. Furthermore, this factor is the only one over which the members of a society can perhaps exercise some control.”
Weil’s third factor includes a politics of technology, “the only one over which the members of a society can perhaps exercise some control.” In the last two centuries, by far the greatest physical element selecting the industrial technological order has been the mass harnessing of energy. It both completely reordered every aspect of society and drastically, though still not well understood, altered Homo sapiens relations with innumerable ecological systems, fundamentally altering many of these systems themselves. That there remains too little understanding of this is proven by our present technologists’ push to massively increase energy production to power their ill-thought compute control mechanisms.
Mumford wrote a half-century ago, “Too much energy is fatal to life as too little, hence the regulation of energy input and output, not its unlimited expansion, is in fact one of the main laws of life. And contrast, any excessive concentration of energy, even for seemingly valid purposes, must be closely scrutinized and often rejected as a threat to ecological equilibrium.”
To be able to incorporate a social energy equilibrium, homeostasis as it’s known in organic organisms, requires political organization. Once again, back to Weil's beginning: “Order is the first need of all; it even stands above all needs properly so-called. To be able to conceive it, we must know what the other needs are.” At this point, we haven’t a clue to our needs.
