Reading saves your world.
by Thomas P. Hughes
Published by the University of Chicago Press, 2004
ISBN: 0226359336
Hardcover, 223 pages, $ 22.50
Reviewed by Michael Pastore
Human-Built World is a concise history that elucidates technology's essential movements, eras, inventions, thinkers, and ideas. In this balanced treatment of the genie's benefits and perils, Hughes describes the visions of cheerleaders and skeptics as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Beard, Henry Adams, Lewis Mumford, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Duchamp, Margaret Mead, Margaret Bourke-White, Leo Marx, and John Cage. Technology is the focus, but always in relationship to something significant: nature, religion, art, or the quality of human life. First trained as an engineer, Hughes values the creativity in the technological effort, and believes that machines can lead us to a better life. But his enthusiasm is neither blind nor naive. Hughes has listened to, and learned from, technology's harshest critics. The result -- his vision for an ecotechnological environment -- is a sane, realistic, and inspiring bridge between the impractical neo-Luddites and the reckless technophiles.
"Technology," writes Hughes, "is messy and complex. It is difficult to define and to understand. In its variety, it is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." Technology is not the exclusive child of big business and private enterprise. In nineteenth-century America, settlers wished to use technology as an instrument of God, a means for transforming the perilous wilderness into a Garden of Eden. How quickly this illusion went awry! The result — the first Industrial Revolution — littered the new world with factories, steel, smoke, electric power, engines, chemicals, noise, and consumer products unending. The effects on human beings — the uglification of the once-pristine landscapes and the conditions of factory workers — brought storms of protests from authors, artists and public intellectuals. Capturing this disenchantment is the book's cover image, which shows the back of a man (Thomas Carlyle?) standing on a rooftop, looking down over an ugly city obscured by factories spewing smog.
When weapons technology revealed terrible powers during World War II, the focus shifted. Now, technologists started thinking about how to gain better control of the forces their predecessors had unleashed. The work of Norbert Weiner — exploring the interplay between information, communication, and feedback controls — led to the Information Revolution. The Industrial Age of clocks and steam engines yielded to the cybernetic era of communications, control, and computer systems.
The era of mechanization had ended; the vastly more complex world of systematization had begun. The meaning of the simpler era could be interpreted to the public by historians and philosophers; the new era required additional interpretations by specialists: scientists, social scientists, and engineers. New solutions led to newer problems, evermore complex. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in January 1961, asked the nation to examine what he called the "military-industrial" complex. Hughes extends this idea to caution us about the "military-industrial-university complex", where the government effectively controls technological development by awarding millions of dollars to universities for defense-related research.
In the 1960s, failure to control our systems led to more questioning of technology's unopposed reign. The Vietnam War led to protests about the underlying technology-based establishment. Books appeared that revealed the extent of environmental degradation, and resulted in a new wave of environmental consciousness. As always, catastrophes raised awareness. Coastal oil spills, the nuclear reactor crisis at Three Mile Island (in 1979) and the Challenger space shuttle tragedy in 1986 — raised public fears and scientist's questions about how we could control technology's powers.
Hughes's penultimate chapter — about technology, culture, architecture and art — explains how creative individuals responded to technology's increasing influence on everyday life. Some artists embraced the transformed lifestyle; others rebelled. An extraordinary illustration, the 1925 painting Maschinensaal (Machine Room) by Carl Grossberg, "contrasts the richness of religion and the sterility of a mechanized world." After World War II, many artists, protesting technological and social order and control, produced works based on disorder and chance. In a superb section about composer, poet, and painter John Cage, Hughes reveals the rebellious sensibility beneath Cage's penchant for randomness. "Cage did not attempt, like many artists of an older generation, to bring order out of chaos. He did not seek to improve the world, as do engineers, but affirmed life as it is."
The book's final and most original chapter is titled: 'Creating An Ecotechnological Environment.' People in the industrialized nations are satisfied to see technology produce consumer goods and weapons, failing to realize that technology simultaneously creates a human-built environment. Technology, argues Hughes, is value-laden, it is not value-free. Presently, the human-built environment is filled with slums, smog, polluted water and "loss of ecologically nurturing regions."
A book published a few years ago, ominously titled: What Will Be, captured a pervasive and pessimistic Weltanschauung. This reflects a technological determinism that Hughes opposes, and Erich Fromm believed was theoretically unsound and practically dangerous. Hughes says that we have failed to assume responsibility for our human-built world; we have failed to build a world that is beautiful and ecologically sustainable. He writes: "We also fail to take responsibility for the creation of an ecotechnological environment, which consists of intersecting and overlapping natural and human-built-environments. More ecologically sensitive and technologically empowered today, we should ask engineers, architects, and environmental scientists to negotiate with one another as they design and construct the ecotechnological environment."
To effect this transformation, we will help from our architects and scientists and technologists — and more than that. Public participation is necessary. And effective public participation depends on spreading technological literacy to all citizens. Technology must be better understood. Hughes cites the renown essay by Bill Joy, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". In this long polemic, Joy expresses fears that three promising technologies — robotics, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering — will become so complex that they could easily grow out control. Only a technologically literate public "might reject technological determinism and accept the current social science argument that technology is malleable and subject to social control." Planning — compassionate and intelligent — is the whole key.
More than a history lesson, Human-Built World allows us to follow the mind of an extraordinary thinker, encapsuling what he has learned about technology's gorey and glorious past. The result is a profound perspective about the true potential of technology, one that we have hardly seen. Hughes has dared to imagine it. In the ecotechnological future, intelligent planning and humanized technologies will provide us with harmonious relationships between nature, machines, and humankind. Machines and inventions will serve us. The natural world and the human-built world will be — as they should be — at peace.
—Michael Pastore
About the Reviewer
Michael Pastore is the Editorial Director of BookLovers Review and Zorba Press. Currently he is writing his fourth novel, and working to establish the Youthtopia Institute and Youthtopia website, devoted to children, creativity and the arts, humanized technology, and a sustainable world.
BookLovers Review is Copyright © 2005 by Michael Pastore. Copyrights to the reviews are owned by the individual reviewers.
