All These Things
Mathes, William
All These Things Men, Machines, and Modern Times, by Elting E. Morison. M.I.T. Press. 235 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by William Mathes "The great issue about which hangs a true sublimity and the terror...
...In the last chapter, he outlines a method of study and experimentation: "the most important kind of invention for the future lies not, however, as in the Nineteenth Century, within the mechanical realm, but in another area: the way we are to deal with all the new conditions produced by the new machines and ideas...
...Mainly, however, this remarkably intelligent book is a discussion of change, of how men have met technological change in the past (Elting is really a historian in the modern, best sense of the word), and of what change does to men...
...Attempts to describe and prescribe for the technological revolution usually take the form of one-shot, over-simplified reports or books which bask momentarily in the national attention and then follow their predecessors into obscurity and irrelevance...
...Elting Morison's Men, Machines, and Modern Times may not receive wide notice...
...There are no pat solutions to the dilemmas of the technological revolution in Men, Machines, and Modern Times...
...But this minority symposia does not seem to have much effect on the nation's understanding of the revolution it is already experiencing...
...the remedy it does offer is essentially that all of us, on many levels of our national and personal lives, think as clearly and as deeply as we can about what we want now and what we want the future to become...
...remains unanswered...
...Thomas Huxley IT'veryone would probably agree that all the dilemmas intersecting in the process of radical change called "the technological revolution" demand more sophisticated consideration than they are receiving...
...Elting even says we should take Marx seriously, should re-evaluate Marxist theory and psychology...
...Thomas Huxley's question, ". . . what are you going to do with all these things...
...The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and a few liberal magazines are about the only places serious thought is being given to the problems of the revolution...
...The people who should read it —government leaders and policy makers —probably will not...
...It offers no quick or easy remedy...
...Reviewed by William Mathes "The great issue about which hangs a true sublimity and the terror of overhanging fate is, what are you going to do with all these things...
...The sheer momentum of the revolution and a natural avoidance of the complex combine to create a situation not unlike riding an avalanche with one's eyes shut and ears covered...
...the question now is, what are all these things going to do to us...
...If there were available enough books of this originality and intelligence, and if they were read thoughtfully by enough people, then we might yet avoid becoming the victims of the technological revolution and become the inheritors of a wealthy future, defined even more than the present by human needs and potentialities...
...The dilemmas include automation, cybernation, super-mass production, the inundation of the individual by goods and services and the advertising of them, consumer manipulation, the dehumanization of white collar workers, and the unemployment of blue collar ones...
Vol. 31 • January 1967 • No. 1
