Homo Faber: Technology (Lapham's Quarterly XIV/1)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIV/1 Technology (2021) Simon Winchester in his introduction to this collection adduces three phases of “technology proper”: the mechanical, the electronic, and the atomic, and argues that despite the Greek aptitude for mechanical devices, the mechanical age did not begin until an arrangement of mechanisms powered by steam was invented by Watt and his contemporaries. I think this view of technology is limited both conceptually and historically, even though it’s wider than the current most widely used meaning of the word. “Technology” these days usually means electronics, and often (more narrowly) electronic digital devices. More seriously, Winchester ignores spinning and weaving: I wonder who had the wit to put an image of a spinning wheel on the cover.
     I think that technology evolves out of tool making. Homo sapiens and its relatives became the dominant hominids because they went beyond the shaping of natural objects into tools, a process they refined over several hundred thousand years. But then they figured out how to combine shaped pieces of hide, wood, bone, and stone into more complex objects, and how to combine pieces of animal hide into clothing. They discovered a method of invention. Invention is an exponential process. We now have such rapid development that our habits, customs, ethics, and laws all fail to keep up with it.
     I recently came across the thesis that technology as such begins with the invention of spinning and weaving, a far more complex process, which depends on more than the recognition that reshaping a natural object may make it more useful. There is simply no natural analogue to textiles. They may have been inspired by spider webs, but they are a wholly new human invention. Through most of human history textiles were a more precious material than any others. Since the invention of the power loom, textiles have become so cheap that we think nothing of throwing them away. In fact, we make too much of the stuff, and even the poorer countries of the world no longer want our cast-offs.
     The next major phase of technology was the production of new materials, ceramics and metals. Both require exquisite control of fire and raw materials. Both put a premium on the human ability to imagine consequences, to observe and infer effects from causes, to imagine possibilities and find ways of testing them. The industrial revolution that Winchester adumbrates as the beginning of technology began when some European “natural philosophers”, inspired by Arabian examples of extensions of ancient knowledge, devised methods of systematic investigation of the world around them. By so doing, they accelerated that process of the mutual interplay of inquiry and technology that Winchester describes in his introduction. We live with the effects, in a system of constant invention and (occasional) improvement. This collection shows us how we have become more aware of both the process and our inability to escape from it.
     Another well done overview. ****