Technics and civilization by Mumford Lewis

Technics and civilization by Mumford Lewis

Author:Mumford, Lewis [Mumford, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology and civilization, Industrial arts, Techniek, Philosophy, Civilización, Maquinaria, Maatschappij, Science, Condiciones sociales, Sociology, History, Inventos
ISBN: 9780156882545
Goodreads: 688489
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 1934-12-01T00:00:00+00:00


ment and upon functional readjustment, rather than upon more foreign chemical and mechanical aids without such conditions. Here again the intuition of Hahnemann as to the role of minute quantities and the natural therapeutics of his school, anticipated by over a century the new regimen—as Osier himself handsomely acknowledged. The psychological treatment of functional disorders, which made its way into medicine with Freud a generation ago almost completes this new orientation: the social element is alone still largely lacking. As a result of all these advances, one of the major problems for the new technics becomes the removal of the blighted paleotechnic environment, and the re-education of its victims to a more vital regimen of working and living. Tlie dirty crowded houses, the dank airless courts and alleys, the bleak pavements, the sulphurous atmosphere, the over-routinized and dehumanized factory, the drill schools, the second-hand experiences, the starvation of the senses, the remotenes? from nature and animal activity—^here are the enemies. The living organism demands a life-sustaining environment. So far from seeking to replace this by mechanical substitutes, the neotechnic phase seeks to establish such life-sustaining conditions within the innermost purlieus of technics itself.

The paleotechnic phase was ushered in by a slaughter of the innocents: first in the cradle, and then, if they survived it, in the textile factories and the mines. Child labor remained in the cotton mills in the United States, for example, right down to 1933. As a result of greater care during pregnancy and childbirth, together with a better regimen in infancy, the mortality of children under five years has been enormously decreased—all the more because certain typical children's diseases are, through modern immunology, under better control. This increasing care of life has spread slowly to the occupations of maturity: mark the introduction of safety devices in dangerous industrial operations, such as masks in grinding and spraying, asbestos and mica clothing where the dangers of fire and heat are great, the effort to abolish lead glazes in pottery, to eliminate phosphorous poisoning in the preparation of matches and radium poisoning in the preparation of watch-dials. These negative measures toward health are, of course, but a beginning: the positive fostering



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