Thoughts on the megamachine 

A fundamental concept of the Green movement, I believe, is the idea that there has been a Great Schism of Lifeways in the human experience.

On the one hand we can talk about the Old Ways (as Gary Snyder does) and say that, for satisfying human relationships centered around mutual-sustenance-of-life . . . it takes a village.

On the other hand, to achieve high levels of productivity and control (as per the value system of modernity) . . . it takes a social megamachine.

“Modernity” in this context dates back to the Great Transformation into the era of agriculture, urbanism, and historical development. It was precipitated by a transformation of values. In his book, The Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford describes a central aspect of what that entailed. Productivity and control became dominant values when vernacular communities found themselves confronting a crisis necessitating intensification of self-production of food. These values fostered the emergence of the social megamachine. From that point on the historical trendline was away from the Old Ways toward the New (the state/technocracy/megamachine complex).

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The “chief features” of this new type of society, writes Mumford, “constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the concentration of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.”

One can see the differences here between the kind of technics embedded in an egalitarian society and technics-as-power or technology. As Mumford argues, people “of ordinary capacity, relying on muscle power and traditional skills alone, were capable of performing a wide variety of tasks without any external direction or scientific guidance beyond that available in the tradition of the local community. Not so with the megamachine. Only kings, aided by the discipline of astronomical science and supported by the sanctions of religion, had the capacity of assembling and directing the megamachine. This was an invisible structure composed of living human parts, each assigned to his special office, role, and task, to make possible the immense work-output and grand designs of this great collective organization.”

(the above from David Watson’s essay “Empire and Ecological Destruction: Civilization in Bulk,” which appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of Fifth Estate)

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Modernists erroneously view the megamachine as liberatory, capable of ("some day") producing abundance for all. Marxists want to democratize it. Some anarchists posit decentralizing it. But it is inherently centralist and elitist; inherently oppressive, repressive (see Marcuse) and exploitative. In a word, it is inherently Leviathanic.

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We can’t just “go back” to the Old Ways. What we can - and must - do is to change course toward rebalancing: away from the paradigm which values productivity, control, power, accumulation, aggrandizement; toward lifeways which are more modest, more earth-based, and more locally-oriented - valuing stability, responsibility, social cohesion, and a healthy relationship to nature.

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