Electrifying America

MIT Press selected Electrifying America as one of 50 books to celebrate when it was 50 years old.  I was asked to prepare a short reflection about it, which appears below. 

The late 1980s was a good time to reflect on and analyze electrification, a process that had begun in the 1880s and been completed in my childhood. When I took up the subject, electricity had become "natural" but it was not difficult to recover its recent novelty. I was also experienced enough, with three previous books (on Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and General Electric), to realize that this was a wonderful subject and to know how fortunate I was to start work with the encouragement of a contract from MIT Press.

I researched Electrifying America when there was no email or Internet, although I proudly wrote on a new word processor (that had no hard disk). Most documents had to be gathered in libraries and archives, which was less a hardship than a pleasure. Where could I better get a sense of the early electric light than at the Edison National Historic Site? I did research in Muncie Indiana (better known as Middletown) to understand how a typical small city had adopted electricity. Likewise, I studied the electricity-mad Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where it had been held in 1901. Such experiences gave me an invaluable grounding in the material culture of my subject.

That grounding stretched back to my childhood. I often visited my grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, which, when I first was there, lacked electricity. I also glimpsed the pre-electric world among the Amish and Mennonites whom I encountered while growing up in central Pennsylvania. During summers in Boston, I delighted in streetcars, and pestered my father to take me for rides, demanding to know how the system worked. A mechanical engineer who had co-authored a book about steam-power plants, he explained to me elementary mechanics and electrical machinery. Decades later he was still teaching me when we discussed sections of Electrifying America in draft form. By then, I was also teaching him some social and cultural history. They are at the center of the book, which fuses my education in American Studies with an understanding of technical details and an immersion in specific places. It proved to be the longest and one of the best of the books I have written for MIT Press, though an author always likes to think the next book will be the best one. (My America's Assembly Line will appear with MIT Press in spring, 2013.)

Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology received a full-page review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in September, 1991, and that December it was named a Times Notable Book for the year. It won the 1991 Abel Woolman Award from the Public Works History Association, and in 1993 it received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. It is still in print.

America's Assembly Line

 After the American Century

The American Assembly line is now more than one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen were strung out in a line, on an October day, with the cars moving past each work station, and it turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods.

The American Assembly line is one hundred years old. Exactly when to mark its birthday is a little in doubt, as the experiments that led to the assembly line began at the Ford Motor Company in April 1913 and the managers had no name for the emerging system until after it emerged. That spring and summer automobile parts were assembled on some short, experimental lines. In September Ford prepared to do final car assembly. The new form of production had become a conscious goal. Workmen strung out in a line, with the cars moving past each work station, turned out to be far more efficient than previous methods

The assembly line seems in retrospect to be an obvious technology. Why didn’t the manufacturing technique of subdividing the tasks of production and lining them up in the order of assembly emerge much sooner? There are many interconnected factors that explain why the assembly line emerged when it did and not before, but three were particularly important.

First, parts much be absolutely interchangeable, or else they do not fit together. Machine tools that made parts had to be extremely accurate before this was possible. Eli Whitney envisioned the advantages and convinced Thomas Jefferson to support his efforts to make identical parts for muskets. However, American armories and other manufacturers such as those making sewing machines struggles for most of the nineteenth century to achieve the precision necessary for an assembly line.

Second, in order to arrange machines and processes in an assembly line order the source of power must be extremely flexible. This was not the case in steam-driven factories, where power came steam pipes and from from overhead line shafts, belts and gears. The further steam was from its source, the less powerful it became. As a drive shaft and gear system grew longer, more and more energy was needed just to keep it turning at all. The power train in such a factory was not flexible, and therefore steam power was not well suited to experiments in manufacturing design. In contrast, electric motors, furnaces, and lights could be placed anywhere, and machines in an electrified factory could be placed in any order desired.

Third, an assembly line is expensive to set up, and it makes no economic sense to invest so much capital in one unless a large market exists, a market willing to purchase a single product.  The United States developed such a mass market, in contrast to Europe, where trade barriers balkanized the market. In France, Britain and Germany, there was a “class market” that demanded differentiated products that appealed to different segments of a smaller pool of consumers.  After 1914 European manufacturers visited Detroit to study the assembly line, but few industries could build comparable factories because Europe was not yet a mass market.

Aside from these three factories, an assembly line required sub-division of the labor into tasks of equal length, which deskilled much of the work force. It demanded that workers repeat a few actions, and annual Ford employee turnover rose to over 300 percent in 1913. In response, the company introduced the $5 Day, doubling the average wage. Not only did the higher wages keep people on the job, but workers with higher wages could afford to buy the products of mass production.

By the early 1920s half of all the automobiles in the world were Fords, Henry Ford was a billionaire, and his factory workers were among the highest paid in the world. Thus emerged a system of production that almost miraculously was able to increase production, raise profits, and pay higher wages, all at the same time. Henry Ford’s ghostwritten My Life and Work became an international bestseller. It briefly seemed that the assembly line would lift humanity to a new level of leisure and prosperity. The Boston department store owner, Edward Filine declared.

Mass production is not simply large-scale production. It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that increased production demands increased buying, and that the greatest total profits can be obtained only if the masses can and do enjoy a higher and ever higher standard of living. For selfish business reasons, therefore, genuine mass production industries must make prices lower and lower and wages higher and higher, while constantly shortening the workday and bringing to the masses not only more money but more time. . . .         Edward Filene, Successful Living in This Machine Age, 1931

The story of the assembly line in subsequent decades was not quite what Filene imagined, for it was also an efficient method for producing tanks and bombers. Moreover, as the assembly line was adopted worldwide it often was used to drive down wages rather that raising them. In the Cold War, the assembly line became a symbol of American prosperity, yet at the same time many feared technological unemployment. Meanwhile, Japanese corporations reinvented the assembly line as lean production, which was then re-exported to the United States.

The assembly line is still evolving as a system of production, today largely monitored and controlled by computers and increasingly “manned” by robots. It has become inseparable from central political and social issues such as automation, unemployment, competitiveness, resource depletion and global warming. At its centennial, the assembly line was being reconceived as a green technology based on recycling and alternative energies.

These and other topics are further explored in America’s Assembly Line.

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, reconsidered

 Remarks made at MIT celebrating the fiftieth anniversary  of the publication of 

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden

 

I first heard about The Machine in the Garden when a freshman at Amherst College in 1964. I saw it reviewed in the local newspaper, and I went out and bought a copy in hard cover, as a Christmas present for my father. He was interested in the history of technology, but I was not, or so I thought. I did not consider reading it myself, until I had a course with Leo Marx the following year. 

Amherst prides itself on a low student-faculty ratio and small classes. But Professor Marx’s survey of American literature was so popular that he taught in the largest lecture room on campus. About 150 students took the course every year, which meant that about half of all the Amherst student body chose to take it. He lectured on the Puritans, natural depravity, attempts to define "what is an American" from Crévecoeur onwards, the pastoral dream of America, the madness of Ahab in Moby Dick, Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience, and Whitman's barbaric yawp heard over the rooftops of the world. For those of us taking the course, this literature often seemed to be a meta-commentary on our times. The generals in the Pentagon were our Ahabs, the leaders of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements our Thoreaus, and Bob Dylan was our version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Our best hope, it seemed, was to survive the coming apocalypse as the Ishmaels of our generation. This was not the thrust of Professor Marx's course, I hasten to add, which was a most inspiring and coherent set of lectures on nineteenth century literature.  I then bought a second copy of The Machine in the Garden, by then in paperback. Reading it, I could hear Leo’s wonderfully engaging voice, which at times has an almost hypnotic quality when he reads from and explicates literature. The survey course made such an impression that his seminars were oversubscribed, and I was one of the lucky 20 who managed to get into one of them.

When each Amherst class graduated, the custom was to select a faculty member as an honorary member of the class. Shortly before graduation the faculty member selected gave a final lecture to the entire class in the College chapel. My class of 1968 selected Leo Marx, and he lectured on technology in American society, with considerable reference to Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Human Development, which had appeared the previous year. I cannot claim to recall his argument in detail, but it linked the themes of  The Machine in the Garden with sociology and philosophy, notably Martin Heidigger’s understanding that the essence of technology lies in the mind not the machine. The tensions analyzed in The Machine and the Garden were not new, but had emerged in antiquity, as with Mumford’s example was the building of the pyramids. Classical references were also in Leo’s book, notably his discussion of the emergence of the pastoral genre in ancient Greece and Rome and its re-emergence in early modern Britain.

Let me draw a few conclusions based on these Amherst years. Before its publication, Leo’s book developed to some degree through his teaching. Many close readings of particular authors were presented and no doubt refined in front of his students before the volume itself appeared. Through the process of teaching, it seems, Leo found compelling ways to make his argument. The ideas themselves had first been nurtured at Harvard in the 1940s, where he studied with F O Matthiessen and Perry Miller, and where he was Henry Nash Smith’s TA. But he reworked his dissertation for over a decade. He was not forced to rush into print in order to gain tenure, as is the unhappy practice today. This is a great book partly because it was closely linked to teaching and because its author was able to give it time. 

My copy of The Machine in the Garden went with me to the University of Minnesota, where Leo had once taught, and where Alan Trachtenberg [who spoke just before I did] was one of his students. His former colleagues recalled him fondly, particularly Barney Bowron, who taught me much about late nineteenth century American literature. The Machine in the Garden was highly regarded at the Center for American Studies, and I found it useful not only in courses but also in framing my PhD thesis. Only in graduate school did I fully understand that this book was quite interdisciplinary. At Amherst the combination of history, literature, fine art, and the social sciences had seemed quite natural, but at Minnesota the faculty at these departments did not always share a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Notably, the New Criticism was still strong in the English Department, and I found that I had to defend the “myth and symbol” approach and to find arguments for the practice of American Studies itself.  To my surprise, I discovered many arguments along these lines in The Machine in the Garden, in paragraphs that had not seemed so important when I was an undergraduate. I more fully understood its importance in shaping the development of the field of American Studies. It offered a model for how to combine sweeping analysis with close readings of texts, including literature, political speeches, government reports, and much more. It was genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on classics, history, psychology, philosophy, popular culture, and  fine art, even as it kept the main focus on literature.

By the middle 1970s when I was out of graduate school, academic fashions were changing rapidly. The field of American Studies was going through a transformation that emphasized social history more than literature and that focused on racial injustice, class tensions, and gender inequality.  These matters were not excluded from the American Studies I had known at Amherst, and it has always seemed to me that they were very much part of the tradition of American Studies that Leo represented. Nevertheless, each academic generation seems to establish itself by attacking those who went before. The so-called “myth and symbol school,” which in fact never formally existed or identified itself by that name, came under attack. This is not the place to rehearse the debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Suffice it to say that while it is true that the book might have included such writers as Willa Cather or Ralph Ellison, their addition would not have undermined or compromised the argument, but rather showed its strengths. There is an enormous difference between leaving someting out because it does not fit a line of argument and leaving something out because not all of American literature can be discussed in a single book. In any case, The Machine in the Garden has outlasted its critics, most of whom  are little remembered today except by specialists. It remains in pint, and people continue to cite it today. It is so well-known that other books refer to it in their very titles. In 1994 appeared, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton), in 2004 The Machine in Neptune’s Garden (Watson Science), and in 2001 The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.  The journalist Joel Garreau has written an essay, "The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise" (1991). There is also a gothic/darkwave musical duo who call themselves “The Machine in the Garden”. No doubt there are more examples.

Throughout my academic life both Leo and his book have preceded me. When I went to Spain on a Fulbright, I found that Leo had been there lecturing the year before, and The Machine in the Garden  was a celebrated work. When I went for a year to The Netherlands, I found that he was friends with several people there, and that he had apparently lectured at all their universities. He had also spent a Fulbright himself in Britain, and he was well-known in Germany. Furthermore, Leo spent enough of his childhood in France to speak that language. It is difficult to find a European professor of American literature who has not read The Machine in the Garden. I could give many more examples, but one final one. A month ago I sat down at a random table in an airport restaurant waiting for my flight. At the next table a Finnish woman was talking about a lecture she was going to give in Stockholm about ecology and literature. It turned out that one of the first books cited in her paper was The Machine in the Garden.

When I bought that first edition for my father fifty years ago, I could never have imagined how much it would come to mean for me, for American Studies, and for the history of technology. As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is also being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in other fields. It remains useful in my research and teaching. A colleague at the University of Texas told me that the new graduate students are quite interested in it. One of my classmates from Amherst, Gordon Radley who has a high position at Lucas Films, tells me that The Machine in the Garden has been influential in the formation of some of their motion pictures. If a comprehensive study were done of this book's influence, many more such stories would come to light.

After half a century of prominence, The Machine in the Garden has become an important part of  American culture. It is one of those rare books that is, at the same time, a primary source and a secondary source.  We read it both as one of the highest achievements of American Studies in its first two decades, and as a compelling meditation on the place of technology in American society. 

 

Why did the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Summit Fail?

Denmark and Global Warming, part I

Fall in water level, Paraná River, between July 1, 2019 (left) and July 3, 2020 (right)
Satellite photographs courtesy of NASA

In 2022 the dire state of the world's climate has become starkly clear. The image reproduced here shows how drastically drought has reduced the water level of the Paraná River in Argentina. The Paraná is the second largest river in South America, stretching more than 4880 kilometers from its mouth near Buenas Aires in Argentina into Brazil, and it normally is navigable in large ships from the sea to Paraguay. However, due to an extended drought, between July 1, 2019 and early July 2020, it shrank into a small stream. NASA has posted many such images of drastic climate change from all parts of the world, showing shrinking glaciers, rising flood waters, expanding deserts, and other consequences of global warming. The evidence is overwhelming, and the need for immediate action is clear.

This is not a surprise. The problems were understood and widely discussed before 2009, when the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit (COP-15) failed to reach binding agreements. Seen from the outside, Denmark would appear an ideal venue for such a meeting. It is a highly developed country whose economy has continued to grow even though it is a cradle-to-grave welfare state with high taxes on gasoline and new cars. It has stringent insulation standards for new buildings. Even in the international economic downturn of 2008, its unemployment remained under 5% in 2010. It is largely energy self-sufficient, with its North Sea oil and gas. It has no atomic power plants (though it occasionally buys power from such plants in Sweden). It is a world leader in wind power, and more than half of its electricity comes from alternative energies. Its citizens all own and regularly ride bicycles to work and to the shops. Denmark seemed to demonstrate that energy restraint and prosperity go hand in hand.

Seen from the inside, however, Denmark was not such an ideal venue for the Climate Summit. In most nations the global warming debate finds a large majority of scientists agreed that the problem is real and urgent, even if businessmen and politicians are often reluctant to recognize the problem or its possible consequences. These generalizations also apply to Denmark. When it took power in 2001, the new government (with a prime minister from the Venstre Party, which shared power with the Conservatives) was just about as skeptical about global warming as George Bush. The new coalition wanted to prove they were different from the Left coalition they had defeated, and they chose to show this in the area of the environment. The Conservative-Venstre coalition embraced Bjorn Lomborg, a home-grown skeptic about global warming. Not a scientist but a statistician, Lomborg had been an obscure Associate Professor until his 2002 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press) was a worldwide bestseller, praised by the business press, notably The Economist. The Danish Government seemed keen to undercut the emerging consensus on global warming, and therefore it created and funded a think tank just for Lomborg, who called it the Copenhagen Consensus Center. It was not placed within a university, but directly funded by the government. This provided Lomborg with a generous budget and a platform from which to attack environmentalists and question the wisdom of spending funds to combat global warming. At the same time, the new government shut down Denmark's less expensive humanities research center (created in the 1980s), which promoted peer-reviewed academic research and had no particular political agenda. (Unhappily, the government's general treatment of universities proved to be no better than this decision suggests.)

Being officially skeptical about global warming had its drawbacks, however. Denmark has large windmill manufacturers, including one of the world's largest, Vestas. Alternative energies were also popular among Danish voters. Furthermore, already by 2004 the evidence for global warming was becoming so strong that inaction based on skepticism was becoming an untenable posture. Greenland belongs to the Danish crown, and international teams of scientists doing research there continued to observe unmistakable signs of global warming, notably the accelerated melting of glaciers. They also could document changes in the world's air quality, using the snow deposits for several thousand years to measure pollution since well before the industrial revolution. The warming of Greenland also mattered to Greenlanders themselves, who send two representatives to the Danish Parliament (Folketing). The coalition government had only a narrow majority, and Greenland's representatives had the potential to become crucial in certain voting situations. In 2004, the Venstre-Conservative coalition decided it wanted to look a bit greener, even though it still funded Lomborg's skeptical enterprise. A similar shift took place in Great Britain, where David Cameron embraced some environmental issues in order to give the Conservatives a new look. 

In Denmark, this policy shift had a human face, and her name was Connie Hedegaard. One of the youngest people ever elected to the Danish Parliament, she had left to become a journalist for some years, before returning to become the Minister for the Environment in August, 2004. The public knew her as an on-camera television journalist for the national network. Hedegaard spent several years working up enthusiasm for holding the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, and in the process she literally traveled the world. She remade the image of the Conservative Party in Denmark, and spearheaded an ambitious Danish program to increase alternative energy, reduce total energy use, double the funding for energy R & D, and raise taxes on CO2 emitters. She then became the European Commissioner for Climate. It appears in retrospect, however, that while Hedegaard excelled at photo opportunities and at charming important foreign politicians, she was not particularly adept at laying the groundwork for a climate agreement. 

Furthermore, the governing coalition did not entirely support her green objectives. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the canny Prime Minister from 2001 until he left to become general secretary of NATO in the summer of 2009, often dragged his feet when Hedegaard wanted environmental reforms. Indeed, despite her appointment, the coalition government's two main parties still appealed to different constituencies, with Venstre remaining skeptical on the environment, while the Conservatives seemed greener.

These internal tensions mirrored the problems at the Copenhagen Summit itself. In its first days, Connie Hedegaard chaired the general sessions. She knew many of the delegates and had spent years thinking about the intricacies of the issues. She knew where the different national delegations stood. No one doubted her desire to reduce greenhouse gases, and she had identified herself with resolving the problem of global warming. However, part way through COP-15, as foreign heads of state began to arrive, Hedegaard ceded the chair to the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen The official reason given was that he was the appropriate chair for a meeting of so many presidents and prime ministers. In terms of protocol, this seemed logical. 

But switching to a new chairman halfway through the conference was a mistake. Few of the delegates knew the Danish Prime Minister. He had only been in office a few months and lacked international experience. He did not speak English particularly well. Worse still, Lars Løkke Rasmussen was not an elegant speaker or diplomatic personality. His own supporters compared him to a bulldozer, but he could not even begin to steamroll China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia. When the Prime Minister tried to hold back the draft of the final agreement, the delegates became angry. He wanted to pull a final compromise out of the hat and get the assembled nations to sign it. He also wanted to be both the official host and serve as the leader of debate. The latter took so much time, however, that he missed the all important dinner with the Queen, attended by most of the important leaders. Worse still, the process of writing a compromise agreement behind closed doors took not hours but precious days of COP-15's final week. The conference ground to a standstill until, too late, Connie Hedegaard again took the reins.

The divided Danish government that supported both Bjorn Lomborg and Connie Hedegaard was not unlike the conference as a whole. The foreign delegations at COP-15 had not oreoared a nearly complete agreement  over the preceding two years. On arrival for the two-week meeting they were not even close to a final statement. A few industrial nations, like Norway and the Netherlands, were prepared to make comprehensive commitments. But most nations were less ready to make legally binding promises, and some did not want controls on carbon emissions, notably Poland with its extensive coal mines, the oil producers, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. The Middle Eastern states were already hurting from lower energy prices after the global downturn that began in 2008, and they wanted compensation for any future "lost" oil sales. The newly developed economies of Brazil, India, and China resisted requests to slow down their recently achieved growth. 

In particular, China had not come to Copenhagen with any intention of cutting back. Their offer was to increase CO2 emissions by "only" 40%, and they were not willing to allow in-country monitoring of this increase. The Americans were willing to cut their emissions by close to 20%, but starting from a 2005 baseline this would only take them back to where they were in 1990. The Europeans and the Japanese offered substantial cutbacks from the 1990 level, but only if other nations made sacrifices as well. Otherwise, they feared putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Add to this cocktail the demands of African nations for huge subsidies to help them to develop without becoming major CO2 polluters. Several nations made generous offers to help, notably the Japanese, but there was no agreement on how such donations ought to be calculated or distributed. Unhappily, the quite different agendas of the participants, on a large scale, mirrored the divisions within Denmark itself. The lack of skilled diplomatic leadership from the Prime Minister made a bad situation worse, but it was probably not crucial to the Copenhagen Summit's failure.  The discord was probably irresolvable, with the EU and Japan on one side verses the oil producers, the new industrial economies led by China, and the self-proclaimed "victim economies" in Africa and Asia. In the waning hours of the meeting, the United States attempted to navigate the middle ground between these intransigent parties, but to little avail.

The Summit was not a failure for everyone. China emerged with free hands to develop as fast as it could. It could invest in solar power and windmills and build atomic plants with no requirement to seek energy efficiency. China got to throw its weight around and show it could not be forced to allow inspectors in to see just exactly how much CO2 it was producing. Other beneficiaries were those who doubt the reality of global warming, notably most of the American Republican Party. The Republicans apparently never asked themselves why they sided with the Chinese on this issue. The socialist opposition to the current Danish government also was a potential winner in this fiasco, as the Danish Prime Minister hardly distinguished himself. With the two Danish political blocs in a virtual dead heat, his diplomatic ineptitude had the potential to tip the balance and let the Left coalition win the next election. The Copenhagen Summit did nothing to enhance the standing of current leaders, except possibly Connie Hedegaard, who soon went off the Brussels to be an EU commissioner. 

President Obama emerged as a bit of a winner too. After years on the sidelines, he brought the US into an active discussion of global warning, and proved adept at speaking to all parties in the search for a compromise. He was hampered, however, by the scientific ineptitude of the Republican Party, which 13 years later still is genuinely challenged by the theory of evolution, physics, genetics, modern biology, and global warming itself. Given America's slow pace of environmental legislation and its position as the most polluting nation in world history, even with Obama as leader, the United States had difficulty being a leader on climate issues. This limp became a broken leg once Donald Trump entered the White House.

The winners at the Cop-15 were strange bedfellows: Middle Eastern sheiks, Danish socialists, Hugo Chavez, the American Republican Party, coal mining corporations, Russian oil interests, the Nigerians, and the Chinese oligarchy.  As for the losers, that would be everyone else, particularly anyone living in low lying nations like the Maldives, most of Africa, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Possibly some nations will disappear beneath the waves and millions of people may one day die or be displaced because of this failed summit. 

Perhaps the only good thing about the Copenhagen Summit was that few seemed to question the science. There was a general agreement that global warming was real and that the problem was rapidly getting worse. Or was there? Bjorn Lomborg emerged from the summit with funding for his think-tank unscathed, and he remained the darling of coal mining companies, oil executives, and financiers. On December 23, 2009, he made fun of the failed summit in an article for the British Financial Times. Ironically echoing Al Gore, he declared, "The fact that the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen approach to global warming was clearly getting us nowhere was apparently one of those inconvenient truths that people prefer to ignore." 

Meanwhile, some nations remained threatened with fatal floods, and millions living in coastal zones from Bangladesh to Copenhagen to Louisiana may still have to relocate. The President of the Maldives, an island nation barely above sea level, Mohammed Nasheed, declared in Copenhagen, "We are all Maldivians now."  

The sequel to this article will look at Denmark and global warming in 2022.

 

Harari’s World History

 

Readers of this blog may be interested in a review article of 3500 words I published in Technology and Culture 62, no. 4 (2021) Here I reprint only the opening paragraph, out of respect for the journal.

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Evolution toward Intelligence without Consciousness? Harari’s World History 

Yuval Noah Harari’s three books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, have sold more than 12 million copies. This review will not summarize their 1,400 pages so much as characterize their overarching argument. Harari has a Ph.D. from Oxford and teaches world history at Hebrew University, but his writing is more popular than academic in tone. There are few footnotes. A chapter in Sapiens on “The Marriage of Science and Empire” has just ten notes, and a chapter on capitalism has only four. Harari usually ignores rather than disputes alternative theories. In Sapiens, he treats Karl Marx as a religious thinker and asserts that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is “probably the most important economics manifesto of all time.”  He displays no awareness of how business historians have reconceived the corporation during the last half century, preferring to invoke the tired trope of the “invisible hand” that was decisively undermined in 1977 by Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand with more decisive critique in later works such as Philip Scranton’s Endless Novelty.  Smith’s “invisible hand” theory was adequate to comprehend the economy of 1800 but became increasingly inadequate after c. 1840.

    As in this case, Harari’s bibliography is often haphazard, and his knowledge of some subjects is inadequate to formulate good questions, much less answer them.

As these opening lines suggests. I find many problems with Harari's arguments.

Rethinking the Consumption of Energy

In histories of energy, before c. 1980 supply was the main story, while demand was taken for granted. Business historians, anthropologists, and Marxists alike long treated energy as largely a question of supplying a necessity. Business historians sought inspiration in the work of Joseph Schumpeter or Alfred Chandler where entrepreneurs held the centre stage. Historians of coal, oil, and gas focused on extraction, organization, and marketing, and wrote relatively little about end users. Early studies of electrification dealt with inventions, power generation, transmission, and the formation of monopolies, but said little about how and why ordinary people adopted this new form of energy. Likewise, automotive history before c. 1975 focused on invention, production, labour relations, product design, and marketing, with far less about the popular reception and use of automobiles. 

Luna Park, Coney Island, c. 1910
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

During this early period, Anthropologists considered energy to be a fundamental need, along with food, water, and shelter. In 1949 Leslie White argued in The Science of Culture (Grove Press) that systems of energy were so fundamental that societies could be classified according to how much light, heat, and power they had mastered. The society with the greatest access to energy was the most advanced. The most primitive were those that controlled nothing more than their own muscle power. The domestication of animals such as oxen and horses thus placed Renaissance Europe at a higher stage of evolution than the Aztecs; the British mastery of steam power placed them above colonial peoples; full electrification lifted American and European societies to a still higher stage. In such theories, societies with atomic energy occupied the highest level, which apparently promised perpetual inexpensive power. Early Marxist authors were not at odds with these assumptions about energy, as they also viewed history in terms of advances in productivity. They argued that the hand-mill gave way to waterpower followed by the steam engine, and each increased the scale of industry. Even when writing about advertising, Stuart Ewen proclaimed that advertisers were Captains of Consciousness (McGraw Hill, 1975). Workers and the means of production, not the consumer, played the central roles. All these approaches saw energy primarily in terms of increasing supply and paid less attention to demand. The business historians, anthropologists, and Marxists all tended to see consumers as a passive 'nation of sheep' whom advertising could easily manipulate. 

By the 1980s, however, historians began to understand consumers as actors whose decisions shaped which products succeeded in the market, as documented elsewhere in this volume. The notion that advertisers controlled consumption collapsed after Roland Marchand's seminal Advertising the American Dream (University of California Press, 1986) revealed that agencies continually responded to changes in public taste, and were forced to follow trends beyond their control. Ruth Schwartz Cowan persuasively argued that purchases were negotiations at a 'consumption junction'. Her argument was part of the contextualist approach championed by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (The Social Construction of Technological Systems. MIT Press, 1987). They presented technologies as parts of the lifeworld, and they focused on the cultural factors that shape the invention, use, and interpretation of new objects. My own work along these lines (Nye, Electrifying America, MIT Press, 1990) examined the social construction of electricity between 1880 and 1940 by ordinary people, who wove it into urban life, factories, the home, the farm, and the sense of the future, as could be seen in newspapers, novels, popular speech, painting and photography. In such studies, consumers were not passive but selective, and they used energies for their own purposes.

But consumers are not the whole story. Hughes advanced an alternative approach that focused on organizations and institutions in Networks of Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) He argued that once a society made initial selections in the design of its energy system and these became institutionalized, a 'soft determinism' set in. The whole complex of machines, installations, personnel, and educational programs acquired a 'technological momentum' that was difficult to change. Once utilities or oil companies had geared up to supply what millions of consumers had become accustomed to buy, the energy system moved with great force in a single direction. In the industrialized West, by c. 1920 both the automobile and the centralized electrical system had attained this 'technological momentum'. Even the 1970s energy crisis did little to alter the form of either system in western countries. (See Nye, Consuming Power, MIT Press,1998)

Any study of energy consumption needs to recognize the constraints of technological systems whose momentum has been established. These systems are large in scale and embedded in landscapes, where decisions of previous generations are built into the layout of settlement, lighting, transportation, and recreation. This approach assumes that one must look at both institutional and personal energy consumption. It also has environmental implications, because the consumption of energy is not only difficult to modify but it is inseparable from problems of mining, acid rain, smoke pollution, CO2 emissions, climate justice, and global warming. Because of this intersection, much recent work on energy history intertwines the histories of technology, the environment, and consumption, including my When the Lights Went Out which provides a history of power failures in the United States during the twentieth century (MIT Press, 2010).

More recently, historians of energy have been developing international comparisons, as I also did, in American Illuminations (MIT Press, 2018). A good deal of that book compares and contrasts nineteenth century lighting in Europe, Britain, and the United States.  It demonstrates that their transitions from gas to electricity were by no means identical. Indeed, many scholars are now concerned with energy transitions, both in the past and in the present. As I result, I developed an essay on energy transitions for an on-line seminar held in the fall of 2020, where ten scholars sought to rethink energy history. Each of us presented a paper, including many that did not deal with the US, Britain, Germany or France, but rather turned the spotlight Latin America, New Zealand, Greece, and Canada. My essay has the provisional title,  "A Model for Heterogeneous Energy Transitions."  I hope this collection will soon have a publisher.

Technologies Matter

Editorial Statement

This blog is produced by myself, David E. Nye, and it is devoted to technologies understood as part of culture. It is not exclusively about one nation, but it does focus to some degree on the United States, where I am a citizen, and on Denmark, where I live. The word "technology" is not often clearly defined and explained. Therefore, I begin this blog with a brief definition of the word.

Technology

The word "technology" emerged into English from Latin during the seventeenth century to describe systematic study in the applied arts. It was not a widely used term in the eighteenth century, when it was defined as a description of the mechanical arts. In the United States it became a bit more familiar after the publication of Elements of Technology in 1832. It was written by a Harvard University professor, Jacob Bigelow, and for the next decade one finds references to the term primarily in citations of his book. As Leo Marx has observed, "through most of the nineteenth century, the word technology referred to a kind of book," typically a manual that described a particular branch of mechanical knowledge. A few engineering colleges embraced the term, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it remained unusual. Only at the end of that century did a few sophisticated writers such as Thorstein Veblen begin to use the word to refer to the practical arts collectively, and this conception was not widely adopted until c. 1920.

Before that time, Americans employed other terms to speak about what would later be called technology. They spoke of the "mechanic arts" or the "useful arts" or perhaps "science" in contexts where one might use "technology" today. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that the word began to mean entire systems of machines, and even so at times it is used as an annoyingly vague abstraction that is both cause and effect. More recently, during the 1990s, the unstable meaning of the word was further complicated when journalists and stock market trades began to use "technology" as a synonym for computers, information systems, and digital devices of all kinds. This blog will not use the term in that way.

Within the field of the history of technology, the term is generally understood to refer to techniques, tools, and machines embedded in cultural contexts. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine human beings as pre-technological. All peoples seem to have some tools, such as traps, clothing, weapons, pottery, baskets, ovens, or irrigation systems. All cultures seem to have developed tools to provide shelter, protection, food, warmth, music, art, and entertainment. These devices pre-existed the relatively recent technology of writing, which emerged thousands of years later. Technologies are inseparable from verbal, visual and kinetic systems of meaning, which vary from one culture to another. In short, technologies are inseparable from what it means to be human, but they vary from one group to another. Even within one country, considerable variations are common.

When so defined, technology does not refer to a deterministic system of machines that marches inexorably toward some inevitable result. Rather, technologies are socially constructed, malleable, and constantly evolving. While some authors still espouse deterministic ideas about technology, these are seldom scholars in the history of technology. They do not agree with Karl Marx that new forms of production force society to develop a certain class structure. It is a misguided notion to think that society passes through inevitable stages, such as "Taylorism" and "Fordism,"  Nor do they agree with Marshall McLuhan or others who argue that systems of communication have a decisive effect on the shape of society. 

Through technologies, people can enable diversity, but governments and monopolies can also use technologies to impose uniformity. There is noting inevitable about their adoption and use, whether windows, fences, street railways, light bulbs, radio, computer games, or the Internet. Each can be manufactured, adopted, and used in different ways. The process of incorporation is not only a question of invention, development, and manufacturing but also political, gendered, symbolic, and psychological. 

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For a detailed history of "technology" see Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

I reviewed this book in Technology and Culture 61:4 October, 2020, 1212-1213.

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