From The Hedgehog Review, June 16:
Mechanization and Monoculture
Near the end of his brilliant memoir Tristes Tropiques, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss describes his visits to various rum distilleries in the Caribbean:
In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted them in front of ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter, were mellow and scented, whereas those of Puerto Rico are coarse and harsh.
Meditation on this contrast leads Levi-Strauss to a more general insight:
We may suppose, then, that the subtlety of the Martinique rums is dependent on impurities the continuance of which is encouraged by the archaic method of production. To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: Its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. By being doubly in the right, we are admitting our mistake. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.
A melancholy reflection, to be sure—but perhaps not an inevitable one.
The Puerto Rican rum industry observed by Levi-Strauss is a clear example of what happens when, as Sigfried Giedion put it in his still-essential book from 1948, Mechanization Takes Command, mechanization conquests more and more dimensions of human existence: agriculture, food production, bathing and washing. He even has a chapter on how mass-produced furniture changes our very posture. In a conclusion slightly less despairing than Levi-Strauss’s, Giedion outlines his major points:
- “Mechanization is an agent, like water, fire, light. It is blind and without direction of its own.” It is “like the powers of nature.”
- Consequently, “Often [mechanization] penetrated domains that were by nature unsuited to it…. Means have outgrown man.”
- “Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing slavery. But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the world, or even to organize ourselves. Future generations will perhaps designate this period as one of mechanized barbarism, the most repulsive barbarism of all.”
- “It is time that we become human again and let the human scale rule over all our ventures. The man in equipoise we must achieve is new only in contrast to a distorted period. He revives age-old demands which must be fulfilled in our own way if our civilization is not to collapse.”
But how is this to be done? I think there may be a useful way to frame the relevant issues: as a matter of ecology.
After all, the difference between between the “mellow, scented” rums of Martinique and the “coarse and harsh” rums of Puerto Rico is largely a matter of ecology: The “impurities” Levi-Strauss refers to are organisms, organisms that interact with one another in complicated and unpredictable ways that lead, ultimately, to nuanced and complex—and highly variable, from vat to vat—flavors in the end product, rum. To replace “ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter” with “white enamel tanks and chromium piping” is to make the process of rum distillation less wildly organic and therefore less ecologically diverse. And this simplification is, as Giedion might put it, what mechanization wants: a regularizing, an elimination of the unpredictable—everything unpredictable and uncontrollable is designated as an “impurity”—and therefore a remaking of organic processes to render them something more inorganic.
Here is what I want to say: as with biological ecology, so with social ecology....
....MUCH MORE
