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MICHAEl HARRINGTON
so ingeniously interprets to the future which he fears, his argument is
less convincing. There is an "archetypal form," he says, which has
existed since the time of the early kings but which has been named
only in this generation. This is the megamachine. Ordinary men could
perform a wide variety of tasks, including pottery manufacture and
weaving, within an autonomous community. The megamachine, on the
other hand, was a royal creation for only the kings had the power
to build an "invisible structure composed of living, but human parts,
each assigned to his special offiice, role and task, to make possible the
immense work-output and grand designs of this great collective organisa–
tion." And from that day to this, the megamachine has appeared in
different guises throughout history: rocket-building is "our exact modern
equivalent" of pyramid-building.
This theory either asserts too little or too much.
It
is a cliche of
social and economic history that the division of labor has played a
crucial role in the evolution of society and that the hierarchic subordina–
tion of functions has taken many guises.
If
that is all Mumford is say–
ing, then there is no point in claiming the discovery of an unnamed
megamachine. On the other hand, equating the Pharaoh's technology
with Lyndon Johnson's on the grounds that both require complex
organization is an overgeneralization from the evidence. Rocket-building,
as John Kenneth Galbraith demonstrated in
The New Industrial State,
provides an excuse for the government subsidy of an essentially revolu–
tionary technology and the profound difference which marks such an
undertaking off from pyramid building is much more important than
any superficial similarities between the two activities.
But if I would thus quarrel with some of the steps
in
Mumford's
argument, I share many of his conclusions. There is, indeed, a mega–
technics coming into existence and, in the sphere of urball design, it is
sometimes even urged in the name of humane values. To put the
point in somewhat sectarian, but still relevant, terms, there are those
who think it possible simply to transfer the title of the means of pro–
duction from the old order to the new without realizing, like Mumford
(or Lewis Sullivan for that matter), that the very way in which tech–
nique itself is organized expresses the antihuman values which must be
transcended.
If
that dreaming, ritualistic, declaiming and social essence
more decisive determinant of evolution than the character of work. Mumford
himself considers Gordon Childe's Marxist study of
What Happened in His–
tory,
along with Frankfort's
Birth of Civilization in the Near East,
to be
"the most satisfactory general account available" though he cannot resist the
comment that Childe's book is "only slightly biased by his original Marxist
slant."
