HANOVER BROWSING
IN SAMUEL BUTLER'S Erewhon, that biting satire of a machine culture and its ways of life and habits of thought, there is a passage appropriate as an introduction to this month's browsing among books on and around technocracy. This is the paragraph where Mr. Nosibor is described as "a man of at least 500,000 horse-power (for their way of reckoning and classifying men is by the number of foot-pounds which they have money enough to raise, or more roughly by their horse-power)." Modern man in terms of horse-power capacity has not yet reached that high level, although Howard Scott informs us that he is on the way and with his present rate of accelera- tion in his tempo of energy conversion—he and his civilization will get there in the not too distant future. In common with a goodly number of people, I have been dip- ping into the magazine articles—somewhat sensational in tone and exaggerated in con- tent—which busy journalists have laid be- fore us, as well as the half dozen or more books which the technocratic campaign seems to have produced up to date. These books are:
1. What is Technocracy?: Allen Raymond. McGraw-Hill Book Co.
2. Introduction to Technocracy: Howard Scott and Others. John Day Co.
3. Technocracy, An Interpretation: Stuart Chase. John Day Co.
4. The A. B.C. of Technocracy: Frank Arkright. Harper and Brothers.
5. Towards Technocracy: Graham A. Laing. The Angelus Press, Los Angeles.
6. An Outlitie of Technocracy: Wayne W. Parrish. Farrar and Rinehart.
The best of these are 1, 2, 5 and 6, and perhaps in that order.
In addition to these I have gone back to the older source books containing in germ, at least, the major metrical assumptions and economic contentions of technocracy. To understand the work of Scott and his fellow technocrats it is essential for the student to read these older volumes. They did not create nearly as much of a stir in their day as their modern models seem to be doing in our day. Yet they had many of the same qualities and defects. Of course, they did not use the word technocracy, neither did they release on a frightened world their repertory of prophesies of doom and promises of a new day. And this when people are in a psychological frame of mind to be unduly impressed by the one and to rely too unthinkingly on the other. Those older books were brought forth at the wrong time or a few years too soon. Whatever we may think of the validity of the fragmentary analysis of Scott and his cohorts, we can at least admire their effective mastery of the art of salesmanship and publicity.
The result was that these belligerent technocrats had no great difficulty, metaphorically speaking, in not only skinning us alive, but also scaring us to death. If nothing more will come of this intensive educational propaganda we can learn from it a few effective lessons in mass neurosis and social psychology. It tells us something about the ways to make ideas work. The intellectual climate in general was extremely favorable to the campaign. Perhaps it is but another instance of Steven- son's saying that "man cannot live by bread alone, he must have slogans also." Lippmann may be right in regarding it as a part of the pathology of the depression, despite the fact that I think that some of his criticisms of it were slightly unfair. He took some of their statements out of their proper settings and removed effectively their qualifying clauses and relative connotations, and in so doing turned them into unqualified absolutes. That made his task as a critic a little too easy. I am not interested in defending Technocracy but, in the interests of objective criticism, misinterpretation is not to be encouraged.
I am not in agreement with many of the pronouncements of Scott and Ackerman and the others, but there are some elementary but fruitful truths in their interpretation of what is happening in the modern technological world. These truths it seems to me are worth bringing out into the open for the sake of careful analysis and of honest clarification. Too much attention must not be paid to the ballyhoo elements accompanying them. And it is possible surely to handle these ideas with- out tying them up too closely with the character or personality of any one man. One way to do this is to check the statements in the light of the recently published two volume report of the Hoover Committee on Social Trends (Published by McGraw- Hill Book Co.). Incidentally, these volumes are splendid in every way. All I can do here is to draw attention to the data in certain chapters, bearing directly on some of the arguments of the technocrats. Within limits these bear out the shorter and the longer trends referred to so often in these books on Technocracy. The chapters most pertinent in this connection are those in Volume I on "Utilization of Natural Wealth," "The Influence of Invention and Discovery," "The Population of the Nation," "Trends in Economic Organization," and the excellent chapter on "Shifting Occupational Patterns." Using the data in these chapters one can check up on the somewhat inflated statements o£ the technocrats about the displacement of labor and technological unemployment, and the man-hour ratio per unit of output in some of our industries, as well as the rate of increase in the use of energy, so characteristic a feature of the American industrial system. The shiftings of occupations which have taken place in the last twenty years is discussed in an illuminating manner.
IN so FAR as my own checking went I did not discover any significant statistical evidence in this Report that the trends pointed out by Scott are not real trends. I also tried my best to verify some of these things from data available in other important sources and bulletins. But in the main they supported the positions of technocracy, to a limited extent in any case. However, I must qualify this by saying that many of the more spectacular statistics and illustrations of Scott and his group were highly colored and magnified, if not misleading. My chief criticism here would be that all the factors relevant to labor- saving devices and automatic processes, and highly efficient technological plants and factories and practices, were not considered adequately or in some instances were ignored. I would discount many of these statements about 50% or more. Indeed, I think all of them should be deflated to a reasonable extent, that is, in so far as I could find supporting data in their favor. Here, doubtlessly the technocrats have run ahead of their laboratory work. They have done too much talking and too little investigating, and, after all, verbalism in technocracy has no particular virtue. It does not fit in with their scientific and mathematical pretensions. Why they have talked so much I do not know. It may be that the urge to propagandize their ideas became too powerful to resist, or it may be that their sense of the seriousness of the critical situation we are facing this year drew them away from their charts and curves to try to contribute something to our understanding of the technological aspects of this present industrial crisis.
And it may well be that some of their more shaky statements can be explained as Dr. Johnson explained one of his dubious utterances. A critical lady in his enlightened circle checked him up on this and asked him pointedly why he had made such a statement. His short but entirely satis- factory reply was—"abominable ignorance, Madam." That accounts for many of our statements, including my own. And it might explain some of the deliverances of the technocrats. Scott, undoubtedly, shows no great understanding of the best that has been taught in the field of the social sciences, including economics, politics, history, and social philosophy. In his references to these disciplines he has shown a tendency to be impatient, if not ignorant. Here again I write in a qualified way. I can only say that if he were more familiar with the very respectable volume of fairly well-tested and patiently accumulated knowledge which we have in the social sciences he could hardly be satisfied with his own over-simplified social philosophy.
RETURNING TO THE older source books for the moment. The best of these are the following:
1. Professor Frederick Soddy's various contributions as found in Science and Life,Cartesian Economics, The Inversion ofScience, Money Versus Man.
These works of Soddy have appeared at intervals during the last fourteen years. All of them are easy to read and contain most of the ideas of Scott with the exception of some elements in Scott's "theory of energy determinants" and his "metrical energy monetary units."
2. Another good English book is TheEconomic Consequences of Power Production by Fred Henderson. It is written more from the point of view of economic analysis than most of the other books of this nature.
3. The best of the American source books are those of Thorstein Ueblen. The philosophy back of technocracy is found at its best in three or four of Ueblen's volumes. His style is somewhat heavy here and there, but his matter is nearly always challenging and thought-provoking. His Engineers andthe Price System has been called the fountain head of technocracy. Any serious student of this recent challenge to our traditional social thought must go back to Ueblen and his body of ideas. His emphasis on the objective, matter-of-fact, quantitative, and impersonal logic of science and technology as contrasted with the habits of thought and the scheme of living of business and politics is a vital part of the critique of technocracy. The best statement of this philosophy is in certain chapters of Ueblen's The Place of Science inModern Civilization and The Theory ofBusiness Enterprise. He states his position in varying ways but its central point comes out in a passage like the following: "His cannons of validity are made for him by the cultural situation: they are habits of thought imposed on him by the scheme of life current in the community in which he lives; and under modern conditions the scheme of life is largely machine made."
In addition to this important source of technological wisdom, we have also books like Man and His Affairs by W. N. Polakov or the works of Korzybski and Professor Keyser. The stress on the technique of science runs through all of these books. They contrast the fertility of science with the relative barrenness of the social sciences and philosophy. The essential elements in science from their point of view is its metrical, quantitative, objective, and experimental methodology, and the verifiable body of knowledge which has resulted from following such a methodology.
All the writers mentioned in this article assume that this method of science is applicable to social phenomena. The laws of physics are relevant to cultural phenomena, as well as to the world of physics. Our own civilization is viewed by them as having been sired by science and technology. That is why it is so highly organized and complex and, as Chase phrases it, so "technologically tenuous." But the result ac- cording to these writers is a certain dangerous conflict at the very center of our civilization. John Dewey interprets it as a conflict "between modern technology and business"; or as Ueblen expresses it: "Twentieth century technology has out- grown the eighteenth century system of vested rights"; or in the words of Soddy: "The age in which we live is scientific. Four out of every five of the people now alive in this country owe their existence to science and would starve if it were to revert to its former regime. Dangers are crowding thick and fast upon the scientific civilization. Its problems call for fearless and original scientific thought if it is to survive and triumph. It has been left too long in peril of shipwreck at the mercy of mediaeval and obsolete ideas."
This is why these men stress the fact that science has from the engineering point of view solved the economic problem of production and we now have a regime of plenty and not of scarcity—that is, in so far as the technical problem of producing economic goods is concerned. But the problems of distribution and consumption have not been solved because as they view it, science and engineering have not had much to do in those fields. The price system or the profit system is in the ascendancy there. That is why we have production for profit and not for use. That is why we have distress and unemployment and recurrent depressions. The inevitable outcome of this conflict between science and technology and the profit or business order according to Scott and his fellow workers will be the collapse of the price system. It will break down because of its wastefulness of resources, its competitive anarchy, its increasing technological unemployment and its lack of a planned economy. They regard the present depression as a serious symptom of its collapse. The technocrats, therefore, assume that there is no way of harmonizing a progressively modified price system with the underlying logic of science and technology. Their remedy beyond that point or their promises of a new dawn after the break-up are vague and over-romantic. They are strongest in attack and weakest in construction. They also tend to underestimate the recuperative power of our present system. It will not collapse so easily despite the critical crisis it is in at present.
BEYOND THE LIMITS of the economic or the scientific world the technocrats have said nothing. In relation to the large objectives which ought to guide and direct our policies and the non-economic values of an enduring civilization, they have been strangely inarticulate. They have asked no deeper questions in relation to the ampler goals and values of our technological civilization. I take it that they have no philosophy commensurate with their science and technology. The critics of our machine civilization therefore—and there are many such—are likely to go on ques- tioning its goals and real values. Included in this group would be an engineer like Sir Alfred Ewing. In a lecture delivered on "A Century of Inventions" he refers to what he calls "the moral failure of applied mechanics." "Civilization," he says, "turned the weapon upon herself. The arts of the engineer had, indeed, been effectively learned, but they had not changed man's soul. In our diligent cultivation of these arts we engineers have perhaps forgotten that progress in them has far outstripped the ethical progress of the race."
Or take another expression by a doubter of the values of a mechanically efficient culture. This is in a letter of D. H. Law- rence from New Mexico to a friend back in England. "Altogether," he says, "it is ideal, according to one's ideas. But, innerly, there is nothing. It seems to me for the inside life, there is just blank nothing. All this outside life and marvellous country, and it all means so little to one. I don't quite know what it is one wants But there is no inside life throb here—none—all empty —people inside dead—outside bustling. Anyhow, dead and always on the move. Liberty, space, deadness."
Perhaps the answer to this is to be found in Ernest Toller's two plays, Masse Mensch and The Machine Wreckers where he says: "The Engine's Your Salvation. Maker and Master is the Mind of Man."
