Summary, etc. |
Since THE BEGINNING of the century the human mind has been increasingly conscience-stricken in the face of its own<br/>activity and its own creations. And with good reason. The destiny<br/>of machine civilization, born of the application of science to society,<br/>everywhere provokes uneasy speculation, exacerbated by the ma-<br/>terial and moral chaos into which humanity has been plunged by<br/>two world wars. Philosophers, writers, journalists and poets express<br/>and disseminate this uneasiness. Such subjects of discussion as the fol-<br/>lowing are boldly announced on the walls of our city buildings: "What<br/>are we to think of mechanization?” “Is the machine for man or against<br/>him?” Sensitive essayists devise variations on the theme of the<br/>present and the future. At the same time we hear much of humanism.<br/>It is certainly desirable that literature, interrupting the egoistic trifling<br/>in which it has so long indulged, should wish, today, to divert all its<br/>resources to the service of man. But general views, fine sentiments,<br/>intuitions, personal affirmations—however elegantly expressed-make<br/>no solid contribution toward the construction or advance of a well-<br/>founded humanism. The problems of mechanization must be grasped<br/>where they arise, observed and even experienced in their true nature.<br/>The various sciences from which they derive must be studied in order<br/>to judge the evils, and to define the remedies (if such exist) and the<br/>conditions under which the latter may operate.<br/>This work constitutes the second part of a trilogy to which I hava<br/>given the general title of The Machine and Humanism. The subiect<br/>of the first part (La Crise du Progrès) was a study of the crisis in th<br/>ideologies of progress in western thought from the end of the 19<br/>century to the eve of World War ll. Starting with the period of enthusi<br/>astic confidence in the application of science and industry to the welfare<br/>of individuals and societies, it reached, with Taylor and Ford, the great<br/>doctrinaires of technical progress at the beginning Ot the second Indus-<br/>trial Revolution, and gave an account of the tremendous crisis between<br/>the two world wars and the new hopefulness aroused by the immense<br/>Soviet experiment. It was, therefore, concerned primarily with the<br/>history of ideas and studied the intellectual and moral repercussions<br/>(varying with social structures and milieux) of the adventure in<br/>mechanization into which humanity has plunged and in which it<br/>risks disaster.1<br/>The second volume attacks the problems of mechanization them-<br/>selves, restricting itself to the industrial aspect which in itself is a<br/>vast and varied field. The investigation and analysis are restricted<br/>to the workshops of large-scale industry, that is, to the mutual<br/>relations between man and the machines of production, leaving to a<br/>third volume? the task of studying as a whole the milieu of develop-<br/>ment of technical civilization, which also includes the technology of<br/>transportation, communication and leisure (such as railroads, the<br/>automobile and the airplane, the telegraph and telephone, phono-<br/>graphs, talking pictures, radio and television) . Moreover, this study<br/>is necessarily limited to a certain period of time, since it seeks to<br/>grasp the human problems of mechanization produced by the "second<br/>industrial revolution," which was distinguished and defined in the<br/>preceding volume: the period of transition from the craft workshop or<br/>small-scale production, still dominated by the steam engine, to a<br/>complex whole, a veritable octopus of techniques, centering about<br/>the mass application of electricity to industry, and inseparable from<br/>the financial and economic factors characterizing the present phase of<br/>world capitalism. Finally, given the great structural differences be-<br/>tween the societies ot western Europe and the United States, on the<br/>one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, I considered that it<br/>would be methodologically inadvisable to make use of facts derived<br/>from both. In any case, |