Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 263 tions that are typical: watching foundation forms fill or cave in in a downpour, having to correct an improperly constructed septic tank, or being forced to continue a concrete-pouring task despite boneracking weariness. What does Clarke claim to have learned from the Eithin experi­ ence? “By far the most important was the discovery of my own abili­ ties” (p. 15). Nor does he regard himself as other than typical. Our society attaches a mystique to the crafts which is profoundly un­ justified. It leads 95 percent of us to declare ourselves incapable of them. Yet the mundane tasks of laying a drain or making a ridge ladder can heal the breech between hand and brain which our mod­ ern society has created. “It is all something to do with bringing your life back under your own control” (p. 16). The failure of the Eithin experiment should provide the compla­ cent with little grounds for gloating. The calls for appropriate alternatives to environmentally harsh technologies will no doubt in­ tensify. What this book underscores, however, is how difficult and complex the search for transition strategies actually is. Stanley R. Carpenter* The Promise ofthe Coming Dark Age. By L. S. Stavrianos. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976. Pp. 211. $8.95 (clothbound); $4.95 (paperbound). Professor Stavrianos’s essay in futurology remains tantalizingly in­ definite aboutjust how the “self-management in all phases of life” (p. 24) which he conceives to be the wave of the future will work out in detail. He remarks in passing that the future will not be affluent (p. 188), without indicating what methods for assuring equality of income and consumption will prevail, or what aspects of contemporary technology will disappear, other than a disparaging reference to jet airplanes and luxury liners as “dinosaurs.” The bulk of the essay is a somewhat haphazard collection of in­ formation about movements and ideas seeking greater self­ management in economic, political, and social relationships. The tone of the book can be inferred from the chapter titles: “From AristoTechnology to Demo-Technology,” “From Boss Control to Worker Control,” “From Representative Democracy to Participatory Democ­ racy,” “From Self-Subordination to Self-Actualization,” and in conclu­ sion, “The Promise of the Coming Dark Age.” Stavrianos eagerly anticipates a breakdown ofexisting management structures in both the First (i. e., capitalist) and Second (i. e., Russiandominated state socialist) Worlds. He is less clear about future pat­ *Dr. Carpenter is a philosopher of technology who teaches at Georgia Tech. 264 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE terns in the Third (ex-colonial) World, though he is sure that the main center of creative innovation has passed to that world, and espe­ cially to Maoist China, in our time. Yet he is not altogether uncritical of the Maoist pattern of management, recognizing that after Mao the revolutionary zeal of party and people may decay (as happened in Russia), and admitting, too, that the fate of dissidents in Mao’s China is scarcely a model of the enlarged self-management he conceives as the wave of the future. The hypothesis around which the book is built assumes a parallel between the Dark Ages of European history after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the future ahead of humankind today. This leads him to assume that “as in the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago, there will be an assertion of local autonomy and traditions” (p. 168), and, a little further down the same page we find that “the overall economic trend today is also toward decentralization.” Yet in other places Stavrianos also refers to “the shrinking of the earth into a global village” (p. 193) and denounces the power of international corporations, whose growth, he says, has cruelly impoverished Third World nations. Stavrianos’s vision of present and future seem completely im­ plausible to me. He simply disregards factors making the strong stronger, and by focusing attention on various sectarian rebel groups, each in its own way eager to escape control from above, he lets his preferences distort hisjudgment. To be sure, the capacity of bureau­ cratic command structures to manage human behavior can be exag­ gerated. Giants with feet of...