Authoritarian and Democratic Technics
Lewis Mumford-essay excerpt
I am struggling to organize at least 50 years, but likely 60 years, of personal dystopian thought. I revisit my intellectual deep past, then my college years, then my personal devotion to the polar antithesis of the Pole Star bringing us Covid. Intellectual freedom.
And this root is not Left, not Right, not aligned with a party, a program, a personality. I confess it is Anarchy.
Anarchy and DADA and Surrealism and I think simply shouting out and fighting back co-created my thinking in this Kaliforniakated land in which I live. Covid simply confirmed to me I was on spot my whole intellectual life.
Hah hah hah. The joke is on me.
1 Living in truth
KRISHNAMURTI: Where shall we start, sir?
DAVID BOHM: Do you have any ideas?
KRISHNAMURTI: Lots of them. If truth is something totally different
from reality, then what place has action in daily life in relation to
truth and reality? Can we talk about that?
DAVID BOHM: Yes.
KRISHNAMURTI: One would like to or one should or one has to act
in truth. The action of reality is entirely different from the action of truth. Now, what is the action of truth? Is that action unrelated to the past, unrelated to an idea, an ideal? And therefore out of time? Is there ever an action out of time, or are actions always involved in time?
DAVID BOHM: Can you say that the truth acts in reality? That is, although reality may have no effect on truth, truth has some effect on reality?
KRISHNAMURTI: Yes. But one would like to find out if one lives in truth, not in the truth of reality, but in that truth which is not related to reality. Reality is a process of thought, of thinking about something that is real or reflected upon, or distorted, such as illusion.
So what is action in truth? If it is not related to reality, if it is not an action in the movement of time, what is action then? Is there such action? Can my mind dissociate itself from the past and from the idea of ‘I shall be’, or ‘I will be’, or ‘I must be’ or ‘I should be’, which are projections of my own desires? Is there an action that is totally separate from all that?
DAVID BOHM: Perhaps we are going very fast. I think ordinarily the action is related to the fact.
3
4 The limits of thought
KRISHNAMURTI: Yes, we said fact is that which is being made or that which is being done now.
DAVID BOHM: There is another meaning—that which is actually proceeding or that which is actually established by perception or by experience.
KRISHNAMURTI: Which is now.
DAVID BOHM: Yes.
KRISHNAMURTI: The seeing is the doing. Perceiving is the acting in the present. And is the present a continuous movement of the past through the present to the future, or is the present a thing that is whole, that is complete, that is sane, healthy, holy—everything conveyed by that word ‘whole’?
I think this is rather important to find out, because if a man wants to live in truth, this is his first question: what is action in relation to truth? I know action in relation to reality, which is based on memory, on environment, on circumstances, on adaptation, or which is an action to do something in the future.
DAVID BOHM: Is there a separation between truth and action?
KRISHNAMURTI: That’s it.
DAVID BOHM: Is there a relationship, or is it the truth which acts?
KRISHNAMURTI: Yes. That’s right. Is truth action or does truth act unrelated to time?
DAVID BOHM: It acts unrelated to time, but it is action itself.
KRISHNAMURTI: That’s as we have said, perceiving is the doing.
DAVID BOHM: Yes, truth is what establishes the fact. KRISHNAMURTI: And the fact is not only what is being done, what is being made, but the actuality of the moment.
DAVID BOHM: Yes. It is the actual act of perception which establishes
the fact.
KRISHNAMURTI: That’s right. So is perception a movement of time,
a thing that comes from the past to the present and the future? Or
is perception unrelated to that?
DAVID BOHM: I’d say it is unrelated.
KRISHNAMURTI: Yes. So are we saying that perception is action, and
action is truth, and that truth is the perception of the actual, the
what is, the moment?
DAVID BOHM: There is a peculiar history of that, because the
pragmatists have said either that the truth is that which works or
that the truth works. The working is not the same as the truth.
KRISHNAMURTI: Yes. Quite.
DAVID BOHM: There is a moment of time between the truth and how
it works, in that view.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-mumford-authoritarian-and-democratic-technics
“Democracy” is a term now confused and sophisticated by indiscriminate use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we agree, no matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself? This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized knowledge, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these may, by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy. But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part; and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of others.
Around this central principle clusters a group of related ideas and practices with a long foreground in history, though they are not always present, or present in equal amounts, in all societies. Among these items are communal self-government, free communication as between equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community. All living organisms are in some degree autonomous in that they follow a life-pattern of their own; but in man this autonomy is an essential condition for his further development. We surrender some of our autonomy when ill or crippled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion would be to turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life possible — and here I am consciously treading on contested ground — is one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated.
In framing this provisional definition I trust that I have not, for the sake of agreement, left out anything important. Democracy, in the primal sense I shall use the term, is necessarily most visible in relatively small communities and groups, whose members meet frequently face to face, interact freely, and are known to each other as persons. As soon as large numbers are involved, democratic association must be supplemented by a more abstract, depersonalized form. Historic experience shows that it is much easier to wipe out democracy by an institutional arrangement that gives authority only to those at the apex of the social hierarchy than it is to incorporate democratic practices into a well organized system under centralized direction, which achieves the highest degree of mechanical efficiency when those who work it have no mind or purpose of their own.
The tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation. If our eyes had been open, we might long ago have discovered this conflict deeply embedded in technology itself.
I wish it were possible to characterize technics with as much hope of getting assent, with whatever quizzical reserves you may still have, as in this description of democracy. But the very title of this paper is, I confess, a controversial one; and I cannot go far in my analysis without drawing on interpretations that have not yet been adequately published, still less widely discussed or rigorously criticized and evaluated. My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.
The data on which this thesis is based are familiar; but their significance has, I believe, been overlooked. What I would call democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature. This technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just because of its wide diffusion and its modest demands, it had great powers of adaptation and recuperation. This democratic technics has underpinned and firmly supported every historic culture until our own day, and redeemed the constant tendency of authoritarian technics to misapply its powers. Even when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity. No royal mace, no slave-driver’s whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth century Athens.
If this democratic technics goes back to the earliest use of tools, authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activities that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic powers came down to earth, mobilizing and unifying the efforts of thousands of men, hitherto all-too-autonomous and too decentralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon.
The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics drew on inventions and scientific discoveries of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and canalization: above all, it created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts — the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable. Despite its constant drive to destruction, this totalitarian technics was tolerated, perhaps even welcomed, in home territory, for it created the first economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity. But the efficiency of the system was impaired by weaknesses that were never overcome until our own day.
To begin with, the democratic economy of the agricultural village resisted incorporation into the new authoritarian system. So even the Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes were collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in religion and government. Moreover, as long as agriculture absorbed the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, mass technics were confined largely to the populous urban centers. Since authoritarian technics first took form in an age when metals were scarce and human raw material, captured in war, was easily convertible into machines, its directors never bothered to invent inorganic mechanical substitutes. But there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fell apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based — particularly the essential myth of kingship — were irrational, with their paranoid suspicions and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power. For all its redoubtable constructive achievements, authoritarian technics expressed a deep hostility to life.
By now you doubtless see the point of this brief historic excursus. That authoritarian technics has come back today in an immensely magnified and adroitly perfected form. Up to now, following the optimistic premises of nineteenth century thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechanical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all democratic, industrial society. Many have even comfortably supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new freedom now turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centralized authoritarian technics — a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of the world.
Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-162863411
To see the same fibre in blood, in mRNA vaccines, and now in a flu shot — that’s not coincidence. It implies deployment across platforms. This is not environmental noise. It’s signal.
The question is no longer whether these fibres exist. The question is why they’re showing up across so many domains — and what that tells us about the systems we’re embedded in.
Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity. The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication from Old Gold Mountain (Chinese: 旧金山. We are beholden to truth not party. “The time has come," the Journal said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings."