Samuel Butler and Lewis Mumford on technological advancement
“Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing (…) why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables? (…) There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. (…) reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. (…) what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?”
Above mentioned quote is no recent eureka moment, no modern scientist’s epiphany. The quote is taken from Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s classic utopian novel.
In 1859 Butler set foot on New-Zealand. The mystical atmosphere of this freshly colonized land and Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species would form the breeding ground for Butler’s work, initially as a trilogy of newspaper articles for New-Zealand paper The Press. These articles – one of them aptly named Darwin Among the Machines – formed the basis for the ‘Book of Machines’, and it is the ideas from these chapters that inspired this essay.
In the next pages, I want to dive into the similarities that can be found in Butler’s Erewhon and an essay by Lewis Mumford on a phenomenon he calls the Megamachine. I will cover both authors’ concerns on technology changing human nature, but I will end on a message of hope Mumford imparts on us in his book on technology in the history of human development.
Butler’s Erewhon
Samuel Butler was not originally a novelist, nor was he a scientist or philosopher. He came from a religious background but became fascinated by Darwin’s theories on biological evolution, which he took to reading at the time he made a journey to New-Zealand to start a sheep-farm. Inspired by Darwin, he started working on some articles and eventually made up a “new doctrine of evolution” in the ensuing book. His newly imagined evolution would not take place in living organisms, but in the iron, steel and coals of the machine – and where better to have this (r)evolution play out, than in a land of imaginary travels, so as to be unhindered by logic and realism.
Butler made use of the utopia to explore his ideas, and created a remote, idyllic society harboring a great secret. He used his time in New-Zealand as inspiration for his descriptions of Erewhon, the utopian society where the use of all machines is banned – even pocket watches are forbidden.
Butler’s main character is an unknown traveler, whose adventure starts by having him abandon the sheep-farm he works on and risking a dangerous road over the mountains, to find his fortune. When eventually captured by the local people, we discover the land through his eyes.
The traveler quickly notices Erewhon being free of machines, while the inhabitants seem advanced enough. During his first days, one of his attendants discovers his pocket watch, and after this is taken, he is shown a museum of sorts, in which all manner of modern machinery is on display. But it is not until he is more established in Erewhon that he finds out what actually happened to the machines.
The traveler recounts visiting the land’s university, called the Colleges of Unreason. It is there he is gifted a copy of the book that started the undoing of the machines. In this Book of Machines the writer accounts for the dangers of the machine as a being that might gain consciousness; this piece of text has a definitive Darwinian feel, as there is talk about evolution of consciousness in beings. Consciousness is then explained as a sort of intuitive way of doing things, by anticipating and growing and knowing one’s needs.
The danger of the machines, according to the revolutionary text, lies in the rapid development of the machines. Human development will stay behind, and the writer doubts even our morality will suffice to “rule” the machines, as he questions ‘the moral sense of any machine’.
Mumford and the Megamachine
Long after Butler’s musings on evolving machines, in 1966, Lewis Mumford writes the essay Tool Users v.s. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine:
“Man will create a uniform, all-enveloping structure, designed for operation (…) man will become a passive machine-animal whose proper functions, if this process continues unchanged, will either be fed into a machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalized collective organizations. The ultimate tendency of this development was correctly anticipated by Samuel Butler, the satirist, more than a century ago: but it is only now that his playful fantasy shows many signs of becoming a far-from-playful reality.”
However, where Butler’s utopian society banned all technology, Mumford emphasizes humankind as a fundamentally technological creature.
Mumford strongly opposes the characterization of humans as a Homo Faber or toolmaker. He finds the idea that humans owe their intelligence to shaping and using tools falling short; he finds the making of tools is nothing special, and argues humans were lagging behind animals in the fabrication of some important utensils such as containers. Instead of Homo Faber, we should characterize humans as Homo Sapiens, or as Mumford also calls it, “mindmakers”.
By characterizing humans as foremostly thinking creatures, Mumford then moves towards defining them as technological creatures, but not in the way we appear to see technology now – as a means to reduce the workload and be as efficient and thus as productive as possible.
Technology, according to Mumford, is an expression of our working brain and a part of our equipment to face life in all its aspects, and not just the cold machine and the ones-and-zeros of the computer. However, if we accept Mumford’s following theory, humans were being ripped from their technological self much longer ago than we might think.
What we today call technology stems from the emergence of a phenomenon Mumford calls The Megamachine; this is a social, economic or political system in which the cogs in the machine are not made up of iron and steel, but rather of human beings. His most gripping example of the Megamachine is the building of the pyramids of Egypt. The Egyptian Pharaoh amassed hundreds of thousands of slaves to be able to perform the ceaseless work involved in these sublime tombs. According to Mumford, no lifeless machine could have ensured a process as smoothly and efficient as this inexhaustible flow of manpower working day and night, with other slaves in place to step up where one has fallen. Mumford fears the increasing power of the Megamachine in modern times, and part of this fear it will reduce humans to something less than themselves.
Humans and Robots
Trying to define humans, to specify what makes us unique, we often refer to our rationality and capability of feeling emotions and empathy. No other creature seems to have developed these traits as we have. It is what would place us above the mere animal, but in the last years, the focus of our superiority over the animal kingdom seems to shift to an even more frightful creature: the robot. Built to assist us in any way possible, we keep looking for building even more human-like robots to make them suitable for doing work we now do ourselves. Robots to take care of our elderly should for example be recognizable to make us feel comfortable and not too machine-like. However, this leads to a paradox, because the robot should not be too human, either.
Our fear of robots is eagerly fed by science-fiction; there are almost no movies or novels in this realm where the robot remains a trusted ally. Most all science-fiction with robots as players end up in a warning: the robot might start to lead its own life, and its urge to efficiency and objectiveness, reinforced by its lack of emotions – which would be impossible to program – makes the robot a dangerous being.
Well before our development of A.I and self-driving cars, Butler describes an ominous future in the Book of Machines, which would come to pass when we do not keep our machines in check. He emphasizes our dependency on machines, and notes that we ‘are bound to them as slaves’. There are workers who give their life tending to the machines, to prevent them from stopping their work and to make sure they continue to live happily.
This seems eerily current; thinking of developers and programmers designing software and keeping it up to date to ensure continuous accessibility, factories running day and night to supply us with an endless stream of goods we think we need, and ourselves, browsing on our computers and buying every handy new tech-gadget to (as we feel it) improve our lives.
Both Butler and Mumford draw on our fears of the machine, and one could say both see the danger of humans becoming, as Mumford said, a “machine-animal”. But how should we understand this?
Humankind as Machine-Animal
From a Butlerian view, as our use of and dependency on machines grows, two things will happen: humans will become more machine-like, and the machine will become more human-like. To keep our progress going, we will need to build better machines; but this will lead to our lives revolving around consolidating this machine-life. If not, life might turn gruesome:
“The machines themselves being unable to struggle, have got man to do their struggling for them: as long as he fulfils his function duly, all goes well with him – at least he thinks so; but the moment he fails to do best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition: and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and perhaps die.”
This quote seems to point out a paradox: machines make our lives more comfortable, but we need to keep improving them if we want to stay that way. We work on our increasing our machines’ capacities, while at the same time our day-to-day activities will be reduced to the endless performing of mechanical operations that make us in a way more mechanical than the machines we maintain.
In a way, Butler and Mumford’s view on humankind’s degradation by the “hands” of the machines do not differ too drastically. One of Mumford’s main concerns about our increasing craving for efficiency is that we will, in the end, will be reduced to a “presser of buttons”. But that’s not all Mumford is worried about.
Humans becoming a zombie-like creatures trapped in a system of monotony and repetition is one way of seeing the machine-animal; in an even worse case, we could be separated completely from our natural behaviours. If going on unchecked, the system of the Megamachine would root out what is left of both toolmaker ánd mindmaker.
Mumford fears that the increasing want for power, production of goods and the yearning for creating infallible and objective intelligence will eventually end humans as we have known them. We will become subservient to the omnipotence and omniscience of the Megamachine.
Curbing the Megamachine
In the gloom of these predictions, which today seem closer than ever, it could be easy to despair. For what could we do to stop ourselves from our increasing yearning for convenience? Banning all machine-kind but those that are truly analog and unmissable and returning to a simple life, like Butler’s Erewhonians, is not an option – not in the last place because Mumford’s Megamachine is created and sustained by multi-million-dollar companies and governments alike.
However, we could push ourselves to take action on keeping the might of the Megamachine in check.
In his book Technics and Human Development – The Myth of the Machine Vol. 1, Mumford explains that we might start an uprising against the Megamachine. In a most successful way, this would be by creating and sustaining the small organizations, such as our universities, societies, or trade unions, that might “rebel” against the vastness of the Megamachine by means of actions, ideas and principles. We need a vast and varied landscape of these, all with a clear and coherent own identity to give some counter-pressure to the danger of losing all individuality and getting sucked up in the bureaucratic system of the Megamachine. Instead of following technical development into a hole of continuous mechanization of our own lives, try to bend our technological development into a way of life that allows us to spend more time on improving ourselves by getting the education we want or do the kind of work that makes us feel satisfied and empowered. So that we, instead of finding ourselves stuck in endless routines and boredom, might truly and meaningfully connect with the toolmaker and the mindmaker once again.
I would like to end on asking you, dear reader, to keep in mind that there is a world out there full of interesting thoughts and ideas, and that we don’t need a Megamachine to tell us who we are or how to optimize our lives. So attend a lecture in your local library or spend a day reveling in boredom, and remind yourself that sometimes, your own brain is all you need 😉
This essay was originally written by Isis Hazewindus for the IfThenElse Blogging collective and first posted on November 21st, 2021.
Literature used for this essay:
Butler, S., Erewhon, Penguin Classics, making use of the chapters The Book of Machines
Mumford, L., Tool users v.s. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine, from Philosophy of Technology, Wiley Blackwell
Mumford, L., Technics and Human Development – The Myth of the Machine Vol. 1, Harvest/HBJ
Photo credit: Alexandre Debiève on Unsplash