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Men Machines Progress

Men, Machines, and Progress; the Egoist 1914

Content

• Our “Verbal Age” is dangerous: “The hypnotism of sound lulls sense into accepting a “thought,” i.e. an error born of ineffectual thinking, into its categories of existent things, and giving to it a ‘local habitation and a name.’”
  • ie, hypostasization
  • it’s merely a name, no meaning, she complains
  • What is she referring to? Things like Duty, Right, Obedience, Liberty. You are not allowed to question them—that’s hypostasization for Marsden
  • Her main example, progress: “as far as “progress” is concerned it has been tacitly assumed that progress and an easing of the struggle with external environment are one.” (she even uses the word “overcome”)
    • What People Think, esp since the popularity of “Evolution” another empty category: “human progress has been regarded as an inevitable transmutation of this planet into a human world where men can live without hardship, toil, danger and difficulty.”
      • She’s ringing some Adorno and Horkheimer bells here b/c she’s also seeing that people are saying progress is conquering nature for the benefit of man
    • Progress isn’t something that happens in general, but instead a person may progress: “But “Progress” as a generality is the instrument of the rhetorician and the professional exploiter of the brainless.” No such thing as progress.
      • another example of her individualism
    • She’s blasting it as technological determinism: says that it’s NOT true that we can judge the “slavery” of a society by looking at its tools. Why? Just because you have “progress of civilisation” doesn’t mean you have “progress of man” as a result
      • She separates technological progress from human progress, saying that it’s actually HARSH experience (rather than the easy softness of life with good machines) that makes you better, “the difference which exists between them and their environment” not their harmony (me: think The Time Machine)
      • “life on a “press the button” basis will be none too friendly to the growth of men.”
• Upshot: Makes Civilization Look Like Decay
  • “explains why civilisation has become synonymous with decay, a blight eating into the individual lives which make up the human kingdom.”
• What We Really Need, Instead of Progress
  • “To increase the penetrative power of the senses”
  • Instead of changing the environment or caring so much about our discoveries and inventions, change our interaction with it: “What alters is the intelligence which is increasingly able to recognise the existent character of environment. To stand on the sea-shore and hold communion as power to power with a jelly-fish for instance will make it all plain…The “discoveries” are there; what is behind time is the fish.”
• Two Works Assuming the Concept Progress
  • “Electro Individualist Manifesto:” Individualist manifesto that Marsden notes was called by its author, Heinrich Charles, the Anti-Thesis of the Communist Manifesto
    • He says the cause of all revolutions is who has to do the dirty work; men exert effort to avoid manual labor; thus the engine of progress is the scientists who make great labor-saving inventions
    • Notes that now we’re moving from steam (which wants huge machines) to electricity (which tends towards small machines, which are actually more like Tools—so it’s a return to tools). Will break up industry b/c machines can be privately owned.
    • “The Manifesto prophesies that by the year 2000 a single unsupported individual will be able to produce almost without manual labour, and certainly without overwhelmingly harsh labour, the entire round of tasks necessary for the complete service of his needs.”
    • Why the Anti-Thesis of Communist Manifesto? “Electricity will do all the necessary dispossessing and expropriation. It will rapidly put all the present means of production on the junk heap.” will make revolution unnecessary b/c means of production WILL be in individual hands
    • Marsden’s very alarming response to the utopia Charles creates where each proletarian has a self-enclosed home he commands at the press of a button: “what is to prevent some erratic genius being seized with the quite conceivable and quite overpowering dislike to their faces and devising a machine to wipe them out of existence? Indeed until now electrocution is the most familiar of the dramatic forms in which the ordinary public have been made aware of its possibilities.”
      • What does she mean? Just cuz you’ve got cool tech doesn’t mean it will be used in the service of HELPING people, ie of “progress” of man: “There is nothing moreover in the past service of machines sufficient to induce men to set them up as saviours of Society, and electricity fitted to no matter what kind of machine, unless it is kept in its place as a servant will become the master of the unintelligent.”
      • Above all it’s temperament: people who are either active or passive, masters or servants
  • Journal “that considers itself the intellectual organ of English Socialism,” The New Age
    • where the editor hysterically worries about how certain tech advances will wipe out the proletariat due to lower demand for labor
    • it’s an example of the “set” kind of intelligence “which has seen finality in the system he established; who are persuaded that men must either adapt themselves to its ungainly services or present themselves at the door of the lethal-chamber, unwilling but persuaded that they must die.”

Notes

• On Marx and Engels
  • “There is no doubt that they were the most scientific and deepest thinkers, economists and sociologists of the nineteenth Century. But with all their genius in seeing and relating things as others in their day did not, they were still hampered by human limitations. They could not foresee that subsequent revolutionary changes, new inventions entirely beyond the vision of even the loftiest imagination, would make.”
  • Apparently both Charles and Marsden think that Marx and Engels were technological determinists: “came to the conclusion that men must of necessity supply themselves with a new philosophy of living, to wit, one which would fit them—men—to the increased dimensions of the tool.”
    • Actually, they meant the EXACT opposite and abhorred the man becoming a mere appendage to a machine
    • She also thought that they meant that no one could own anything individually. That’s an overstatement.
    • “Max Stirner was not hypnotised by the steam-engine” she says…with Stirner, “Das Kapital” was refuted before it was written.”
      • Also, “Its theories based on word-values had already been proved empty of relevance.” b/c she assumed Marx wanted to “fit the man” to the tool
  • She’s not gonna believe Marx at all b/c she’s too individualist: she says her that ANYONE can become a capitalist, and so that makes it OK.
    • Too individualist: “there will always be those who are born tools” and “It is not the kind of tool which is the decisive factor: it is the lack of temper in the man who uses it”
  • For her, Marx and Engels represent philosophers who let the environment determine them instead of being free thinkers
    • “All thinkers of any value have risen superior to the environmental conditions accidental to their age. It is a sufficient condemnation of the Socialist thinkers merely to state that they have not, and their Nemesis is already treading at their heel. While yet the filthy spectacle of the industrial towns which an easy acceptance of steam machinery made possible still befouls the countryside, the hollowness of Marxian economics with their theories of value can be made demonstrable to the mind of a child.”
    • She says you must accept the environment—“it is what it is”—and go from there
    • She says people are stupid not to see that environnment is “result” not a cause
    • What would Marx say back? That she is standing on her head.
• Where do I agree w/her?
  • The passage from the New Age that she quotes and derides is in fact ridiculous.
    • It argues that we must worry about progress b/c it will inevitably lead to the extinction of the proletariat like the invention of the auto will lead to a smaller demand for horses, thus fewer horses
    • The secret of its silliness is in the statement he makes about the laws of “Economics” always being right (that is, demand/supply will always determine # of people/workers)
  • She says that he gets this concept of “produce” that “runs away with him”
    • Whereas here’s the reality, she says: “that the intelligence that created a monster can create its destroyer; that only by the consent of its creator and user can the machine do anything either for or to the mind which creates it.”
      • There are so many ways, she says, to deal with this “problem”
  • I totally agree with her: she calls herself anti-Socialist for saying that, but actually she is more in line w/Marx and Engels than she thinks b/c Marx and Engels too argued that P E isn’t God and that we are masters of our history
  • When she refers to the “brand of counsel which expounds to the “poor” how the true and inevitable economy of production is that which must lead the majority of the populace to the electrocuting chair” she could have been the mouth of Marx! She’s not a total jerk, you see, but just wants people to help themselves or shut up.
• Where I Don’t Agree
  • About the proletarian: “Is he never going to throw off his non-possessing character on his own account and become a possessor without waiting to be made?”
    • “If the poor want true descriptions prompt and to time they must become articu1ate and supply themselves with a mouthpiece of their own. At present they have neither the brains to conceive nor the strength to produce nor the intelligence to devise the like.”
    • proles don’t deserve anything they won’t do for themselves, and you can’t expect the capitalists to go against their own interests to help the proles
  • She exaggerates the power of merely saying Hey I’m Important and A Unique Snowflake
• What a crazy point: on capitalists and their control of the press, “If it can give the impression that their supremacy pivots round a question of “Right” or “Wrong” and can keep their journals such as the “New Age” busy debating it, why not?” She notes that the socialists at the time aren’t actually doing anything but debating.
  • I’d connect this w/capitalism as an imperative: you just do it, it is just done. without being debated.
• desideratum: desired as essential
• pari passu: at an equal rate
• The Electro Individualist Manifesto mentions Edison as being someone who wants to pour concrete houses in hole, which would mean they’re “machine houses” ... is this Le Corbusier forerunner?