Mumford, Lewis (1966). Tool-users vs. Homo sapiens and the megamachine.
Mumford concludes humans’ mid-twentieth-century commitment to the rationalism of science and technology – and to a vision of a future in which humans not only will have mastered nature but will have separated themselves from it as much as possible – is flawed and unbalanced in that it ignores the essence of human identity and organic life and exalts “technical and scientific progress” (Mumford, 2003, p. 344) with its promises of a chance at the god-like omniscience and omnipotence of the ruling elite or of a position with the cocoon-like comforts of the docile masses (Mumford, 2003, pp. 349-351). First of all, Mumford argues the notion of humans as differentiated by their capacities to create and use tools (or technology) due to hand and finger dexterity is incorrect (Mumford, 2003, pp. 345-346). According to Mumford, humans’ mental capacities as manifested in abstract, symbolic thought, language development and communication, autonomous and social activities, and varied human personalities are what differentiate the human species (Mumford, 2003, pp. 345-347). Mumford also argues, however, it is this abundance of mental capacity that can also drive humans to excess through “demonic promptings of the unconscious,” for instance the libertine excess of a privileged elite exempt from meaningful work or the destructive excess of political or commercial criminals exempt from meaningful prosecution (Mumford, 2003, p. 349).
In Mumford’s view, as an antidote to this propensity for excess, humans have created various means of maintaining balance, by directing surplus mental capacity and energy into “the primeval repetitive order of ritual,” into development of “the ultimate collective product, spoken language,” or into “the discipline of tool-making and tool-using” (Mumford, 2003, pp. 347-348). It is not with balanced, community-based antidotes to excess Mumford takes issue. Mumford takes issue with the antidote to excess embodied by the “megamachine,” an antidote that paradoxically reveals itself not as an antidote, but as a “monotechnics, devoted to the increase of power and wealth by the systematic organization of workaday activities in a rigidly mechanical pattern” for the enrichment of centralized authorities such as the Egyptian pharaohs and their religious, military, and secular nobilities. According to Mumford, this is when humans first became estranged from local, varied, meaningful work devoted to organic “growth and reproduction” and first became subject to “work at a single specialized task, segregated from other biological and social activities,” or in other words, subject to the massive organization, specialization, and mobilization of human resources (Mumford, 2003, p. 348).
In this scenario, most humans have become the unwitting components of a rather abstract machine controlled by a ruling elite with the machine’s primary purpose being the enrichment of that elite. Therefore, from Mumford’s perspective, this abstract machine is not an antidote to restrain humans’ excess, but is rather itself the most perverted expression of that excess, that is of the “delusions of omniscience and omnipotence” harbored in the surplus energy of the human mind. “The archetypal collective machine – the human model for all later specialized machines – the “Megamachine” (Mumford, 2003, p. 348) is for Mumford that which poses the most profound threat to the essence of humanity (Mumford, 2003, 350), especially since it has been vastly empowered by the compounding factors of the influence of the “mathematical and physical sciences upon technology” (Mumford, 2003, p. 344) and the “current scientific and educational ideology, which is now pressing to shift the locus of human activity from the organic environment, the social group, and the human personality to the Megamachine, considered as the ultimate expression of human intelligence” (Mumford, 2003, p. 350). In Mumford’s view, this “machine-centered metaphysics” should be forsaken and replaced with a balanced, life-centered metaphysics that is less centrally-controlled, less “coercive, totalitarian, and – in its direct human expression – compulsive and grimly irrational” (Mumford, 2003, p. 350).