Man as Machine.
by TARQUIN O’FLAHERTY
An astonishing thing happened on the way to the 20th Century. It was something so new, something so extraordinary, so incomprehensible, that people are still talking about it today. It was of course, the 19th Century.Think on this; for thousands of years we’ve either Hunted, or Gathered, or Farmed. Extraordinarily, in the 19th Century, we threw all that away when we blithely said, despite millennia of stability, experience and knowledge; ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers..’ and took to the Industrial Revolution as if the past wasn’t worth a cracker.
Well, it must be said that this bit of behaviour was about as popular, in some quarters, as the Black Death. Suddenly, out of nowhere, all of the certainty, all of the predictability involved in sowing and reaping and harvesting, over thousands of years was gone. For the first time for many a long day, nobody had the faintest idea where the future lay, or indeed, where industrialisation was going. Uncertainty sprang up like weeds and people began to die, dispirited, broken hearted, starved of company and community or simply overworked, in the amazing New Industrial Jerusalem.
Writers began to notice. In England, the richest country in the world, industry (and the military) was killing people by the cartload. Charles Dickens wrote about this and through his writing, helped lessen the horror.
But others, much more optimistic others, believed that industrialisation was merely a step on the way to Utopia. HG Wells, in the late 19th Century wrote several very well received novels extolling the virtues of his proposed Utopian future. The best known of these rejoiced in the title; ‘The Shape of Things to Come’. Two of the others were; ‘A Modern Utopia’ and ‘Men like Gods’. I mention all three just to point out how receptive an audience there was for this type of notion in Edwardian Britain. Britannia, after all, not only ‘Ruled the Waves’ but she was the ‘Workshop of the World’ as well. Utopia would happen at any minute.
Not everybody believed this notion.
Meanwhile, by the turn of the same century and in America, Frederick Winslow Taylor, mechanical engineer and the first ever ‘management consultant’ was testing out his ‘efficiency’ theories on gangs of workers all over industrial America. Fred was the guy who ushered in time and motion studies, but his habit of treating people like machines earned his inspectors the more than occasional smack in the chops. Nevertheless, by the time of the Great War, ‘Taylorism’, and ‘Men as Machines’ was being adopted as the norm.
Henry Ford’s first successful assembly line began the tedious, repetitive business of churning out cars in 1913.
In the Swan Hunter shipyards on Tyneside in the North of England, a ship’s engineer, Yevgeny Zamyatin, had been drafted in from the Czar’s Russia to help oversee the construction of icebreakers for the Imperial Russian Navy. Here Zamyatin first saw ‘time and motion’ in action, as gangs of well drilled men skillfully put ships together.
Zamyatin was an accomplished satirist and had been in jail twice already. Now in the early years of the Great War he was writing a novel that was going to get him in trouble again.
By the time the novel was ready, the Czar was gone, the proletariat had power, and Zamyatin’s ‘We’ was the first ever book to be banned (1921) by the new Soviet Censorship Bureau. The book was finally smuggled out of Russia and published in English, in1924, in New York.
TO BE CONTINUED