BOOKS
149
Is there not an imperative in the society that modem technology
has shaped which manifests a force quite its own, a drive so powerful
that it now can be deflected or controlled only with difficulty? Consider
the frenetic explosion of industrialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in England. Of course, there was technology in Europe prior
to that cataclysm; but it was concerned mainly with war, entertainment
and miracles. The new technology began in England because that
country was a frontier land separated from the continent by a thin band
of water. And it began in the section of England that was itself a
frontier, the raw North Country, which was populated by rough men
who in the course of fabricating cottons were determined to create a
history of their own. The expectation of change was strong enough to
establish a kind of self-fulfilling thrust, presaging the manner in which
similar prophecies are fulfilled in modem technology.
There was no smoothness, no linearity in these alterations: it may
be
that technology'S uneven development has led Harrington to view it all
as happenstance. Technology drastically modified both man's environment
and men's thinking; cities were built and then made places of stench and
disease; the hinterlands decayed as the machine relegated traditional
crafts to the social and economic junk heap; natural materials were
subjected to a relentless belt system; and man became a technicist
cajoling the machine to pour forth greater and greater quantities of goods.
Strategic inventions were
consciously
fitted into the factory which itself
needed only to convert discrete production into continuous technique to
meet the requirements of the modem age. The strength and direction
of this new phenomenon was hardly accidental. One could trace its roots
to an urge to control nature and its materials: the attempt succeeded
because man was willing to pay the price by sacrificing his own sense of
humanity.
And, as Harrington knows, there has been no stopping these forces.
Technology by itself is artifact, but of the kind that has profoundly
formed man's aspirations. Today these aspirations have created a situa–
tion in which the capacity of the few to control the many has been
enormously enhanced in a kind of dialectical fashion. Most men are
now subjected to meaningless, functionless work, compelled to accept
whatever it is that technology offers. The consequence is precisely the
predicament that Harrington describes, for we are only now beginning
to be aware what those who push the buttons have in store for us. Yet
we
are unable to respond because the
raison d'etre
of the machine
demands that we think solely of the efficiency of it all. Having permitted
