Discussion section note:

Good spring to Professor Wu and to all the students:

I’m terribly sorry to have fallen back into my habitual procrastination again……

The Civilizational History of Technology—Taking Mumford as an Example

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was one of the most prolific and influential American thinkers of the twentieth century. His field of vision was extraordinarily broad, ranging across history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, and other areas. Among these, his most abundant and most influential writings were in two major fields: urban history and urban studies, and the history of science and philosophy of technology.

The media ecology school also held Mumford in very high esteem. In [1] *Understanding Media, Culture, and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition*, a book that sorts out the intellectual origins of this school of thought, Strate and Linsay (respectively the president and vice-president of the Media Ecology Association) co-authored a chapter on Mumford, identifying him as a pioneer and founding figure of the school [2]. Mumford, who lived in New York, could even be regarded as a sort of “spokesman” for the “New York school” of media ecology. Still, Strate and Linsay also acknowledge that Mumford’s status as a founding figure of media ecology is often overlooked [3]; on the one hand, this is because Mumford’s luster was overshadowed by the Toronto school’s Innis and McLuhan, and on the other hand because Mumford’s main scholarly work centered on cities or technology. Although both fall within the horizon of media ecology, he did not make media issues his special topic.

I have tried to situate media ecology within the category of “the history of technology,” and from this perspective Mumford’s significance becomes even more important. No matter how broad his range of interests, most of Mumford’s work always remained centered on historical research. He not only provided the history of technology with many new materials and clues, but also gave a new positioning to its methods and significance. One could say that in Mumford’s work, “the history of technology” (and also urban history) is by no means merely one topic or subfield within history; it has already become a kind of historical program.

The Definition of Civilizational History

Mumford’s 1934 masterwork *Technics and Civilization* can be said to be the pioneering work of this kind of history of technology. It is a history of technology, but at the same time it is also a “history of civilization.” In this book, Mumford borrowed a term from his spiritual mentor Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), dividing Western civilization since the year 1000 into three phases: the Eotechnic phase (1000–1750), the Paleotechnic phase (1750–1900), and the Neotechnic phase (1900 to the present).

Noting that this division is not merely aimed at technological inventions, but at the periodization of the entire history of Western civilization, Strate and Linsay also point out: “Periodizing history into clearly defined eras is not new; what is noteworthy is that Mumford’s historical periodization is not based on reign titles or dynasties, wars or migrations, ideas or the spirit of the age, but on technological development.” [4] Strate and Linsay believe that the specific claims Mumford made in his periodization are not important from today’s perspective, but the significance of this work lies in the fact that it “outlines a new perspective on human history: the leading role of technology. … Like later media ecologists, Mumford does not define machines by their internal structure, but by their effects.” [5]

The practice of periodizing human history by technological achievements is not new. As early as 1836, the Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) [6] proposed the three-age system of “Stone—Bronze—Iron,” and scholars later divided prehistory and history into the Paleolithic and Neolithic, and so on, based on the distinction between chipped stone and polished stone. Mumford’s contribution, however, was obviously not to transplant this mode of periodization from prehistoric civilization to modern civilization. On the contrary, Mumford especially opposed precisely this kind of historical view: that human beings are defined merely as “tool users,” and that the progress of tools themselves is taken as the meaning of history.

And this “toolist” view of history has been quite influential in the field of the history of technology. For example, in the preface to the monumental seven-volume *A History of Technology* he edited, Charles Singer wrote: “The Editors are convinced that in our technological civilization the value of man lies in the understanding of methods and skills, by means of which man controls his environment and gradually makes the actual world more comfortable.” [7]

Yet in Mumford’s view, the development of technology, or humanity’s conquest and control of nature, at most is only a kind of tool for human beings to realize their own value. Tools are never value itself. Mumford remarks: “Rail transport may be faster than a canal packet, gaslight brighter than a candle, but speed and brilliancy only have significance when human aims or human and social values are being discussed. If the public want to enjoy scenery, the slowness of the canal boat better meets the requirements than the speed of the motor boat.” [8] In other words, the fact that polished stone tools are more refined and sharper than chipped stone tools does not in itself mean that human beings in the Neolithic achieved any breakthrough or progress over those of the Paleolithic. Mumford believed that “cultural creation” is the more crucial thing, and culture includes not only the ways of controlling nature, but also the ways human beings control themselves [9], especially bodily techniques and social techniques.

Compared with stone tools, Mumford paid more attention to the influence of “containers” [10]—for example, baskets, pottery, granaries, houses, and so on. These technologies matter because they make possible a new way of life, such as settlement.

That is to say, in Mumford, although technology is the thread of history, the protagonist or focal point of history is always human beings. Mumford stresses: “Unless we gain an intimate insight into human nature, we shall not be able to understand the role that technics plays in human development.” [11]

In Mumford’s view, human beings are neither “tool-using animals,” nor simply “rational animals.” In fact, these two seemingly opposite definitions are exactly consistent in the technological age: first, human beings think themselves extraordinary because of their superior rational capacity; then “technology” is regarded as the application of “science,” and abstract theoretical knowledge displays its immense power through tools and techniques. Thus, the toolist history of technology and the rationalist history of science share the same spirit, and so historians either pay attention only to sheer external power, or only to sheer internal thought.

What Mumford attends to, however, are real, living human beings. In his view, “human beings” cannot be defined by any single monotonous proposition: “No isolated trait—even tool making—is sufficient to define the human species. Its unique and singular attribute lies in the fact that it can fuse a wide range of animal propensities into an emergent cultural whole: that is, human personality.” [12]

Therefore, the history Mumford seeks to grasp is the concrete life of the whole human being. He points out that “unfortunately, in the matter of the new task of defining man, the previous century (the nineteenth) contributed little except some fashionable political philosophy: it dealt with the abstract forms of law, such as the individual and the state, and also with abstract forms of culture, such as humanity, nation, and kinship; or, indeed, with purely economic abstract patterns, such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat…” What was obscured was “the social life of human beings, the concrete lives people led in different regions, different cities and villages, in wheat fields, in cornfields, in vineyards, in mines, in quarries, in fishing villages…” [13]

That is to say, the history of technology that Mumford is concerned with is in fact the history of human life. Machines or cities become the focus of Mumford’s attention precisely because they are the environments in which people live. “Technics has been from the first life-centered, and not work-centered or power-centered.” [14]

“From the beginning the most permanent triumphs of the machine have not been in the tools and instruments themselves, since these soon became obsolete, nor in the goods produced, since these were soon consumed, but in the modes of life enclosed in the machine or made possible by it.” [15] “The significance of the machine is not limited to its actual achievements. … Technics has become a creative force…. It rapidly created a new environment and formed some third realm between nature and the human arts; it was not merely a quicker way of carrying out old purposes, but an effective means of expressing new purposes—in brief, the machine advanced a new mode of life, one that far exceeded the ideas of those who actively promoted it. Industrialists and engineers themselves did not believe in the qualitative and cultural aspects of the machine.” [16]

This line of thought coincides strikingly with the media ecology proposition that “media make the environment.” In his later period, Mumford even consciously described his own research as “ecological history” [17]. As D. L. Miller puts it, “Mumford’s social studies, like a biologist studying the natural world, ceaselessly explore and search for the connections and internal relations among various phenomena of life. He always places the subject he is discussing—whether a book, a building, or a city—within a broader cultural environment for observation.” [18]

Technology as the Medium of Civilization

We have already made clear that what Mumford is concerned with is not the history of technological inventions as such, but rather using technology as a thread to examine the history of human civilization as a whole—that is, the history of human ways of life or cultural environments.

So, in the cultural environment of human beings, what role does technology actually play? Of course, the role technology plays in history is a crucial one—but is it some inescapable fate in the sense of technological determinism?

Although the later Mumford became increasingly pessimistic about the fate of humanity, from beginning to end he denied that technology is an unshakeable external force opposed to human civilization. Technology is always within human culture, the result of human choice. Mumford said: “Technics and civilization as a whole are the result of human choices, directions, and strivings, conscious and unconscious. These choices are frequently irrational in so far as they seem objective and scientific—but even if uncontrollable, they are not external. Choice itself is embodied in the small increments of social change, in the instant decisions made on the spot, in the dramatic and spectacular conflicts; if anyone cannot see this choice in the development of the machine, this only exposes his own incapacity: he has failed to notice the gradual accumulation of effects until they are piled so densely that they seem wholly external and inhuman. To reconquer the machine and bring it under human intentions, we must first understand and assimilate it.” [19]

In other words, in Mumford’s view, technology did in a certain sense become an uncontrollable force, but that was merely due to human negligence. And the study of technology that Mumford promoted was precisely intended, through a renewed understanding of technology, to enable people ultimately to wrest control of their own destiny back from the machine.

Therefore, the task of the history of technology is to reveal how, in the full historical development of things, those technologies that determine people’s ways of life came to acquire their decisive status. In fact, no technology descends from outside human history out of thin air; and in the process by which technology moves from nothing to something, from the intangible to the tangible, and finally takes root and sprouts in a particular cultural soil, human intentions and choices are always at work. Mumford believed that because people ignore the history of technological development and only pay attention to the immense power technology eventually displays, they come to feel that technology is some irresistible fate. Historical research will deconstruct the “myth” of technology.

On the one hand, Mumford clearly recognized that technology is not neutral; technology always has its own internal momentum and inherent tendencies. For example: “the steam engine favored monopoly and concentration. Wind and water were free; coal was paid for; the steam engine involved expensive capital outlay, and so did the machines driven by it. The twenty-four-hour day in the mining and blast-furnace industries now spread to other trades, previously operated only by day…. Why should not factories be worked twenty-four hours a day, and why should not the worker? The steam engine became a pacemaker.” [20]

The steam engine was the heart of the entire industrial age. It not only supplied a steady stream of power, but also prescribed the rhythm of human life as a whole, redefining patterns of life in terms of time and space, and changing people’s values. “Steam power not only enlarged the scope of the city, but encouraged new populations to congregate along railway lines and main transportation routes…. The steam engine reinforced and deepened in every direction the slow tendency of the preceding three centuries to seek quantitative results in life…. Wherever the railway extended, the habits and ideals of the mining civilization went with it.” [21]

In this respect, the steam engine was obviously decisive for industrial civilization. Yet the key problem is that the steam engine did not descend like an angel or a devil from nowhere; the seeds of industrial civilization had been planted long before they burst forth in luxuriant growth.

Mumford points out that “the machine had been steadily and constantly developing for at least seven hundred years before the whole earth was transformed by the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution.’ Man had become mechanical before he had completed the complex machine through which he could express his new tendencies and interests…. Behind the major inventions of the past 150 years lay not only long internal technical development, but also a continuous change in people’s ideas. Only when people’s wishes, habits, thoughts, and goals had been redirected could the new industrial processes develop on a large scale.” [22] “To understand the decisive role of technics in modern civilization… we must not only explain the appearance of new machines and tools; we must also explain the cultural background that made it possible for people to accept these new machines and tools on a wide scale…. Mechanization and strict management are not in themselves novelties in history: what is new is that this mechanization and strict management are now deliberately and tangibly governing every aspect of our lives.” [23]

That is to say, on the one hand, mechanical technologies represented by the steam engine did indeed dominate the history of the entire Industrial Age, but the reason they were able to obtain that dominant position was the result of a long process of gestation and selection on the part of human beings.

Mumford claimed that “the key machine of the modern industrial age was not the steam engine, but the clock”[24]. This astonishing assertion cannot be understood merely literally—as though the technological invention of the clock were more crucial than the technological invention of the steam engine. If that were really so, why would the Industrial Age (or what Mumford calls the paleotechnic phase or the mining age) still be reckoned from the invention of the steam engine rather than marked by the clock? In fact, besides the clock, Mumford also listed several other “important inventions” or new things, such as the printing press, army organization, universities, academies, exhibitions, laboratories, and so on, “none of which were less important”[25].

Which invention, or which new thing’s appearance, was in fact the most crucial? The question itself is misleading. In Mumford’s historical vision, what matters is the change, over a large span of time, in the cultural environment; the chronology of technological inventions was never the focus. A history of civilization is different from the traditional chronicle centered on heroes and events.

Although Mumford did not explicitly set out a historiographical theory, his way of telling history is in accord with the “long-duration history” formulated by Braudel, the leading figure of the Annales School, the French historian. Braudel divided history into three kinds: short duration, medium duration, and long duration. Short duration refers to various abrupt historical events, the most dramatic but also the most deceptive for understanding history; medium duration includes certain local trends, such as economic growth or population fluctuations; while long duration spans centuries and includes durable and stable things such as the natural environment and social organization. And even economic history on the medium-duration level may mislead an inquiry into the civilization of long duration—“it may conceal the regularities and continuities of systems that some people call civilization. Civilization here means all old ideas and habits of action, as well as fixed patterns.”[26] Braudel believed that what long-duration history concerns itself with is not events or trends, but “structures”: “The word structure . . . for better or worse, this concept governs the problems of long-duration history. . . . For us historians, a structure is naturally a collection, a building, but more importantly, it is a reality that, over a long period of time, is arbitrarily governed by time and continuously transmitted. . . . All structures are at once both the basis of history and the obstacle to history. As obstacles, they themselves are the limits that human beings and their experience cannot cross.”[27]

The “structure” Braudel speaks of is precisely the “cultural environment” Mumford cares about; any short-duration historical event (such as a technological invention) or medium-duration trend must ultimately be understood within the long-duration background of civilization.

Thus, when Mumford says that for the Industrial Age the clock is more crucial than the steam engine, he does not mean that the event of the clock’s invention is more important than the event of the steam engine’s invention; rather, he means that the cultural environment in which the Industrial Age was rooted had already been constructed through the clock long before the steam engine.

The improvement of the steam engine, as a contingent historical event, can only be properly understood when placed in the cultural environment in which it was able to blossom. So one may say that the cultural environment that made industrial civilization possible preceded the actual Industrial Revolution. Yet this cultural environment did not appear out of thin air either; it was the result of a slow development. Hence Mumford traces the origins of this cultural environment back to the regimented way of life marked by the mechanical clock, and the source of that way of life can be found in medieval monasteries, or in the organization of armies in antiquity.

Later, Mumford even found the prototype of the modern machine in the pyramids of ancient Egypt: namely, a vast and rigid system of social management that erased individual personality and turned people into mechanized working parts, which Mumford called the “megamachine.” “The origins of the machine age did not begin with the so-called Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, but were rooted in the moment when the primitive organizational form of the human machine had just begun—except that at that time this machine was made up entirely of human parts.”[28] “Long before inventors invented engines to replace human beings, rulers had already been drilling and organizing the masses; they discovered how to turn human beings into machines.”[29]

But if the Industrial Revolution had already planted its roots at the source of civilization, would that not be an even greater fatalism? Not so. The key point is that the social organization of ancient Egypt was not the only organizational form in ancient society, nor were all ancient people soldiers or monks. And through the influence of the clock, the steam engine, and the assembly line, mechanized organization, as one of the possible ways of human life, was repeatedly amplified, until it ultimately suppressed other possible ways of human life and came to dominate a cultural environment that might otherwise have been far richer. And historical retrospection may help us discover other possibilities of human life, as well as technological forms that might amplify those potentials.

In the eyes of Mumford and other media ecologists, technology is “an extension of man,” and a technology is always the magnification or projection of some human potential. Mumford said, “By projecting some side of human personality onto a particular form of machine, we create an independent environment, an environment that can elicit responses from every other side of human personality.”[30]

Mumford was deeply influenced by Geddes and pursued the “all-around development of human beings” — “including the development of all our capacities such as reason and calculation, passion and poetry, including mental activity and healthy living.”[31] And technology is precisely the necessary medium through which human beings seek self-development—Mumford believed that “every stage in the human activities of invention, creation, and transformation of the natural environment was less for the purpose of increasing the supply of means of subsistence, or even, for the purpose of controlling nature, than for the purpose of developing and utilizing humanity’s own immensely abundant organic and biological resources, for the purpose of embodying and exercising its latent capacities, with the ultimate aim of more fully realizing its own aspirations and ideals beyond mere biologic existence.”[32]

Thus Mumford is not, like the Romantics, someone who rejects or denigrates technology; yet he also shares the Romantics’ anxieties, because while technology may unleash certain potentials of human beings, it may at the same time suppress the realization of others. For any individual, this is an entirely natural situation: you can choose to become an artist, soldier, engineer, doctor, writer, hunter, entrepreneur, or farmer, but you cannot actualize every one of your potentials at the same time; the advancement and realization of some capacities often means the neglect or repression of other potentials. What Mumford opposes is not the monks who choose a regimented life, nor would he oppose someone who wants to adhere to punctuality. Yet for human civilization as a whole, if one possible way of life ultimately becomes the only option, that is indeed a tragedy of history.

Of course, although Mumford does not adhere to some essentialist definition of the human, and although he emphasizes human agency more strongly, his history-telling still bears a fairly obvious objectivist, or rather God’s-eye, perspective. Although he acknowledges that “insight into the human essence is constrained by the social environment. In the existing social environment, because a great many new mechanical inventions suddenly emerged, eliminating many ancient methods and institutions and changing our concepts of human limits and technological possibilities,”[33] the lines between the words of his historical narrative still seem to presuppose a stable and unchanging “human essence” that transcends specific technological ages, from which he evaluates technology and value from some detached standpoint. In particular, compared with McLuhan and the mainstream of the later media ecology school (with the exception of Postman), Mumford has a much more pronounced humanist (or, one might say, anthropocentric) tendency. On this point, Kelly (J.W. Carcy) thinks that this is precisely where he surpasses McLuhan[34].

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.