Because the era before the eighteenth century is mistakenly supposed to have been technically backward, one of its best characteristics has been overlooked: namely that it was still a mixed technology, a veritable polytechnics, for the characteristic tools, machine-tools, machines, utensils, and utilities it used did not derive solely from its own period and culture, but had been accumulating in great variety for tens of thousands of years.
Consider this immense heritage. If the watermill went back to pre-Christian Greece and the windmill to eighth-century Persia, the plow, the loom, and the potter's wheel went back two or three thousand years further; while its grains, fruits, and vegetables derived from a much earlier period of paleolithic food-gathering and neolithic domestication. The bow that won the battle of Crécy for the English was a paleolithic invention, once used in hunting Magdalenian bison. As for the paintings, and sculptures in public buildings, these issued from an even more ancient paleolithic past: the Aurignacian caves. The introduction of new inventions like the clock did not necessitate on principle the discarding of any of these older achievements.
Not the least significant fact about this 'backward' technology is that the areas in which technical skill and engineering audacity were highest, namely, in the massive Romanesque and the towering Gothic cathedrals,p. 135
drew on the oldest parts of our technical heritage, and were associated directly, not with any utilitarian purpose, but solely with attempts to add significance and beauty to the necessitous round of daily life. It was not the need for food or shelter, or the desire to exploit natural forces, or the effort to overcome physical obstacles that raised this constructive technics to the highest pitch of effort. To express their deepest subjective feelings, the builders of these monuments posed for themselves the most difficult technical problems, often beyond their mathematical insight or craft experience, but calling forth a daring experimental imagination, so daring that it sometimes fatally outran their capacities--as more than one toppled tower revealed.
To build these monumental structures, groups of workers of diverse capabilities and talents were assembled, to perform a wide variety of tasks, from the monotonous shaping of stones into square blocks, small enough for a single man to handle, to the acrobatic feats needed to place the carved stones on the topmost pinnacle. not merely muscular strength, mechanical skill, and physical courage went into the fabrication of these buildings: emotions, feelings, fantasies, remembered legends--in fact, the community's total response to life--took form in these supreme technological achievements. Technology itself was a means to a greater goal: for the cathedral was as near to Heaven as any earthbound structure could get.
Such mastery of the complex processes of architectural creation was not for the purpose of either "making work," as in ancient times, or of doing away with work, as under today's automation: neither was it just to increase the personal prestige of the Master Mason or the incomes of the workers, still less to 'expand the economy.' The ultimate end of such a magnificent technical effort was not the building alone but the vision it promoted: a sense of the meanings and values of life. This achievement has proved so valuable that successive generations of men, with far different religious beliefs and aspirations, have nevertheless felt a fresh infusion of spiritual vitality on beholding these buildings, even as William Morris did, as an eight-year-old boy, when he first confronted, breathlessly, the marvel of Canterbury Cathedral.
Not every aspect of handicraft, it goes without saying, offered such happy working conditions or such ultimate rewards. There was back-breaking drudgery, hardship, crippling organic maladaption, and chronic disease in occupations such as mining, smelting, dyeing, and glass-blowing: yet today, despite our superior medical diagnosis and treatment, many of these disabilities still exist, and have even been magnified in technically 'advanced' industries where the workers are exposed to radioactivity, to lead poisoning, to silicate and asbestos dust, or to malign pesticides like malathion and dieldrin.p. 136
The other human weakness of some handicraft industries, like weaving, their fixation in routine motions and unrelieved monotony, paved the way for mechanization: but the effect of the latter, until automation took over, was to intensify the boredom, while the speeding up of the processes took away the soothing effect of repetition that makes such crafts so useful to the psychiatrist in the concluding phases of psychotherapy, as William Morris discovered by personal experience during a troubled period in his own marital life.
In certain departments of handicraft, the rewards and the penalties were, admittedly, almost inextricable. In some of the highest reaches, as in the Persian rug-making of the sixteenth century, the perfection of both the design and the process of work, demanding as many as four hundred knots to the square inch, might call for a lifetime enslavement of the worker, to reach such a pitch of artifice. There is no need to conceal these ugly blemishes: but also no excuse for hiding one of the great compensations--the work itself was prized and preserved. One of the beautiful rugs that now covers a wall in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London demanded the whole lifetime of the temple slave who made it. But this slave was an artist, and in his art enjoyed freedom to create. At the end of his task, he proudly signed his name to the masterpiece. he had not lost his identity or his self-respect: he had something to show for his working life. Compare the death of this slave with Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.'
To understand the older polytechnics, partly mechanized by the sixteenth century, but not wholly committed to mechanization, one must remember that its dominant arts were solidly based on ancient neolithic foundations: mixed farming--grains, vegetables, orchard crops, domestic animals--and buildings of every sort, from houses and barns to canals and cathedrals. All these occupations required an assemblage of craft knowledge and skills; and the work, in the very process of growth and construction, changed form hour to hour and from day to day. the process itself did not demand staying in the same position, performing a single uniform task, accepting monotony and uniformity, without at least the relief of a change of weather or seasons, or a change of pace.
Consider the performance of the old-fashioned Japanese craftsman cited by Raphael Pumpelly in his 'Reminiscences.' Pumpelly wanted a door that could be locked, so he called in a metal-worker to make screwed-in hinges; but unfortunately this craftsman had never seen a screw. When Pumpelly presented him with an iron screw, the worker went away and the next day brought a dozen brass screws, beautifully made and polished, after being ingeniously molded. "He also asked permission to copy my Colt's revolver. Before long he brought an exact duplicate working wellp. 137
in all its parts, and it was more highly finished." One would look far to find such confidence and resourcefulness in a modern machine shop: it was long ago exiled from the assembly line.
In the workshop and the household there were plenty of tedious tasks, no doubt: but they were done in the company of one's fellows, at a pace that allowed for chatting and singing: there was none of the loneliness of the modern housewife presiding over a gang of machines, accompanied only by the insistent rumble and clatter and hum of her assistants. Except in servile industries like mining, playful relaxation, sexual delight, domestic tenderness, esthetic stimulation were not spatially or mentally separated completely from the work in hand.
Though hand labor brought many skills to the highest point of perfection--no machine can weave cotton as fine as Dacca muslin with number 400 thread--and even more important characteristic was its wide diffusion, which is another way of referering to the tool-user's essential autonomy and self-reliance. Nothing proves this better than the annals of overseas exploration, with their repeated record of building seaworthy ships to take the place of a wrecked vessel. "The ship's carpenter who marched in Cortes' army, directed the building and launching on Lake Texcoco of a whole fleet of brigantines big enough to carry cannon." Such a mode of work was equal to any emergency: neither the skill nor the overall knowledge of design was restricted to a few specialists. That our present gains in horsepower have been diminished by a loss of effective manpower, and above all cooperating mindpower, widely distributed, has still to be sufficiently appreciated.
Karl Buecher gave an account of this inter-relation between handicraft work and esthetic expression in his classic study, 'Arbeit und Rhymus,' unfortunately never translated into English; and I have emphasized, in 'Art and Technics' and elsewhere, the fact that mechanical invention and esthetic expression were inseparable aspects of the older polytechnics, and that, down to the Renascence, art itself remained the principle field of invention. The purpose of art has never been labor-saving but labor-loving, a deliberate elaboration of function, form, and symbolic ornament to enhance the interest of life itself.
This ancient reciprocity between folk work and folk art reached its apogee in music between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries: witness Samuel Pepys choosing a serving-maid partly for her qualifications in holding her part in song around the family dinner table--or Franz Schubert, who, according to legend, translated the work song of the pile drivers on the river into the melody and rhythm of his Nocturne in E-flat Major. If orchestral music reached its climax in the symphonic works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, it was perhaps because it stillp. 138
obviously drew upon the wealth of folk songs and dances that were tied to the rural crafts: a heritage that Verdi, in an industrially 'backward' country like Italy, could still draw on.
Had this craft economy, prior to mechanization, actually been ground down by poverty, its workers might have spent the time given over to communal celebrations and church-building on multiplying the yards of textiles woven or the pairs of shoes cobbled. Certainly an economy that enjoyed a long series of holidays, free from work, only fifty-two of which were Sundays, cannot be called impoverished. The worst one can say about it is that in its concentration on its spiritual interests and social satisfactions, it might fail to guard its members sufficiently against a poor winter diet and occasional bouts of starvation. But such an economy had something that we now have almost forgotten the meaning of, leisure: not freedom from work, which is how our present culture interprets leisure, but freedom within work; and along with that, time to converse, to ruminate, to contemplate the meaning of life.
Aside from the agriculture and building, the most radical weakness of the older handicrafts was their excessive craft-specialization, which prevented the free circulation of knowledge and skill, and deprived the individual crafts outside the building trades of the great corporate assemblage of knowledge that had made the engineering feats of the cathedral builders such marvellous vehicles of cultural expression. At the end of the Middle Ages, this excessive specialization began to break down through an invasion from above. Note that Rabelais made the study of arts and crafts part of Gargantua's education: on cold and rainy days he devoted himself to carving and painting and went with his tutor to observe "the drawing of metals or the casting of cannon, or paid visits of jewellers, goldsmiths, and cutters of precious stones; or to alchemists and coiners, or to tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, and other craftsmen of that sort; and everywhere ... they learned and considered the processes and inventions of each trade."
In this description, Rabelais was recording, in effect, the great innovation effected in person by the Renascence artist: the audacious all-around amateur who, though he might still have to attach himself to the Goldsmith's Guild, was actually breaking through a cramping and obsolescent craft isolationism; for this new figure was equally ready to paint a picture, cast a bronze, plan a fortification, design a pageant, or construct a building. Whatever he could think he could draw: whatever he could draw he could do. Through defying the constrictions of craft specialization, the artist restored the full exercise of the mind.
This facility was not the product of a special genius: was Vasari a genius? It was due, rather, to a disruption of older municipal, guild and ecclesiastic institutions by princely despots and patrons. This gave anp. 139
opportunity for detached, non specialized minds to move freely from one craft to another, utilizing their hoarded skills, but not having to invent them alone, de novo, as the machine designers after James Watt were largely forced to do. But note: the most successful of these artists, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Christopher Wren, derived their strength mainly from the ancient, if highly organized, building crafts--as a later industrial giant, Joseph Paxton, did from horticulture.The past, as imagined by Mumford, is assessed through a rosy prism. I cannot help but think that he reveals his agenda in passages like this. This passage does show a clear break that we see now between traditional society and post-traditional society, and we feel it in our generic institutionalization through school and the mantras of self-exploration and self-expression with very little if any training in the practical skills of a trade. Instead, children are trained to sit passively in rows before a single point of information, and train their attention on a lecture delivered orally, in print, and through multimedia presentation.
The post-traditional society, as the name suggests, is one where the individual has radical freedom to pursue the profession of one's choosing and will not be forced, before the age of consent, into the family industry. The post-traditional society provides a notion of freedom from this very thing. It comes at a specific cost to both mastery and to identity management. By the age of 18 the person living under the mandates of traditional society had logged the ten thousand-hour floor set to measure mastery in a profession. By that token, the professional in a traditional society knew what to do. Contrast this with the young adult in a post-traditional society. By 18 he has mastered passive television watching, product consumption, and the disposable identity formed by taking part in social groups through the adoption of fashion trends. The post-traditional society hasn't deviated much from the social forms that existed prior. Now, the choices one has are presented to the individual and his personal growth work helps him to secure some sense of a self amid the din of advertised choices and the diversity of lifestyles that grow from them. But the choices and resources available are managed by a profit-seeking institution instead of a family member motivated by the survival of a peculiar social concept: reputation.
Reputation is a check to a social organization that relies on a degree of specialization. The reputation of the artisan would motivate this person to both cultivate a craft skill and the good graces of a public that would need his services.
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