Your Tax Dollars at Work: American Manufacturing: Command Performance

Understand, I love computers.  I'm still reading David F. Noble's Forces of Production, and it contains this passage:

In the mid-1960s, the Air Force produced a promotional film on numerical control, to push the use of the newer technologies within industry.  Entitled Modern Manufacturing: A Command Performance, the film was targeted at top managers in the metalworking firms.  A technocratic version of Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times, it opens with a dream sequence of a manager seated at his oak desk.  The manager idly sketches a new part, then abruptly leans over and barks into desk microphone: “Orders to the plant!”  The verbal commands are automatically translated into computer commands and from that point on all manufacturing, assembling, and shipping processes are automatic, requiring no human intervention – the automatic factory.  The film concentrates on the machinery rather than people; the “modern” manufacturing establishment has N/C machine tools galore, plus automatic molding, forming, welding, testing, punching, handling, plotting, and drafting equipment – all “elements of our plan of the future.”  (As contrasted with “conventional” manufacturing, illustrated by a group of half-clad black “natives” running a conventional engine lathe in a thatched hut!)  [219]

My first reaction to that last bit was to wish I could see the film. Then I realized it was entirely possible that I could; and sure enough, it was available on YouTube.  The scene Noble described occurs nearly at the end of the film, at about the 32-minute mark.  It turns out that he didn't remember or describe it quite accurately: first there is a scene, probably using stock footage, of actual Africans working metal without machines, with pre-industrial technology, and then a probably staged scene of a single black man in a kind of sarong, manipulating a machine tool under a thatched canopy.  See for yourself.  (Notice too that one of the few floor-level factory workers shown is black; no doubt the filmmakers thought they were very enlightened to include that touch.  The only woman depicted is, of course, a keypunch operator.)  This is one of the true benefits of the digital age, being able to access material that only a decade or two ago would be very hard to track down.  I didn't have to look in university archives, I didn't even have to leave my apartment: there it was, in all its fifty-year-old glory, proclaiming the triumph of Modern Science, available to you at a surprisingly low price when the taxpayer subsidies are taken into account.  The time is fulfilled, and the day of "emancipation from human workers" (235) is at hand!

The film stresses the importance of total integration of manufacturing processes, reproducibility, and interchangeability (“tapes can be sent anywhere in the world and produce interchangeable identical parts”) and epitomizes the ideology of automation in action.  “Modern manufacturing,” the narrator repeatedly points out, “shortens the chain of command,” “eliminates human error,” and “greatly reduces the opportunities for a breakdown in communications.”  “Instructions are fixed,” not subject to human intervention or “human emotion”; management commands cannot change.  Modern manufacturing is indeed a command performance, where the commands come from the top.  We must automate, the film concludes, we must eliminate human interventions and uncertainty and reduce the time required to move “from design concept to finished product as soon as possible.”  Such command performance is vital “for the survival of industry and our country” [219].

There are a lot of fascinating details in this primitive infomercial.  One theme that recurs, as Noble shows, is the idea that managers are scientifically competent.  Maybe in some smaller companies there were engineers who'd moved up to management, but American Manufacturing: Command Performance was made to appeal to big contractors in the aerospace and weapons sectors.  And really, how many managers even there could have produced detailed specifications for new machine parts off the top of their heads, or polished drawings like the one we see early on?  I'm pretty sure it would have taken more than an hour even for a fulltime, experienced draftsman to come up with that, to say nothing of the time needed to design the part in the first place.  There's a lot of fantasy going on here.  “As of now,” the salesman/narrator intones, “conventional computers do not accept oral commands; so the instructions are put on punched cards, or tape.”  That's quite an understatement for 1963, or for decades to come.



More pertinent for the hard-nosed businessman's interests, Noble reports that the claims made by the film are over-optimistic at best:

“Complexity degrades reliability,” industrial economist Seymour Melman has observed.  Such was certainly the case with numerical control, without doubt the most complex, and unreliable, equipment ever installed in a machine shop environment.  Jack Rosenberg of ECS described the experience in 1958 when the first Air Force-sponsored systems were placed in the factories of prime contractors as “the year of shock for all parties involved, the point at which exposure to reality began.”  The factory environment was hot, electrically noisy, the floors shook, the air was full of physical and chemical contaminants, machine operators mishandled control tapes, maintenance staff was not prepared to deal with electronic controls, servo systems, or computers.  “None of the numerical control designs or designers was prepared for this acutely hostile environment,” Rosenberg recalled.  Anticipating that the machinery would perform as promised, production managers attempted immediately to assign the new equipment to normal multi-shift schedules. The result, in Rosenberg’s assessment, was “chaos.”  “Several machine tools were torn apart by improper programming, operation, maintenance, or servo design.  Several others were damaged.”  Machine downtime in 1959 hovered around 80 percent, owing both to maintenance problems and to the great difficulty of “keeping them loaded” with program tapes. (And without tapes, N/C machines became merely very expensive furniture.)  Programming errors, moreover, proved extremely likely, troublesome, and expensive, prompting Western Electric’s Edward E. Miller to observe that “N/C makes errors with greater authority than anything we are accustomed to.”  When the systems did not function as desired, the problem was compounded by the ambiguity about who or what was responsible.  Machine tool builders were convinced the problems were caused by the electronics, and blamed the control manufacturers, while the latter charged the builders with poor machine design or construction.  Diagnosing a malfunction was thus more than a technical task, which was difficult enough in itself; it also entailed its own particular form of politics.

The first decade of actual production experience with N/C made it plain that industry was not prepared for the second Industrial Revolution, and neither was the technology that was supposed to usher it in [220-1].

In the real world, then, programming numerical-controlled machine tools wasn't as simple and quick as American Manufacturing: Command Performance wanted prospective customers to believe.  It was effective (if not efficient, let alone economical) primarily in advanced aerospace and weapons manufacturing, where cost was no object, thanks to taxpayer subsidies.  Smaller companies making simpler parts simply couldn't afford this kind of equipment, nor did they need its capacities even if they bought it.  The perceived need to compete drove a lot of smaller manufacturers out of business, according to Noble, a reminder that the degradation of American manufacturing long predates NAFTA and the offshoring that became so prominent in the 1980s and after.  Though Forces of Production is nearly thirty years old, it is still relevant, which is no doubt why it's still in print despite its unfashionable -- indeed, counter-fashionable -- message.

I imagine some people will deny that the African scenes are racist; they're just meant to inject a little humor into the production.  If so, it's a false antithesis: this is racist humor, and a glimpse into the mindset both of the American military and of American manufacturing in the early 1960s.  (Remember, this film was made on the taxpayer's dime.)  And the attitudes expressed in American Manufacturing: Command Performance are still with us, as shown by the persistence of scientific racism if nothing else.  The use of African tribesmen to symbolize machine-tool technology that didn't use computer-driven numerical control -- a bit old-fashioned, true, but hardly primitive -- is familiar too: similar tropes turn up in a lot of secularist derogation of religion.  One ongoing theme in Forces of Production is the technocratic hatred for humanity, accompanied by an apparent belief that the technocrats themselves are not human, not emotional, just pure disembodied rationality, entitled to command their brutelike inferiors.

As I said, I like computers.  But they need to be kept in their place.  Even more important, the people who inflate their capabilities, pushing them as panaceas -- let alone the next step in evolution -- need to be kept in theirs.

"Tribalism" and the End of the Year Blahs ...

... to be followed, I suspect, by New Year blahs in short order.  I don't entirely know why I've slowed down in this last week of the year, though it's partly because of the heavy snow we got on the day after Christmas, and refreshed on Saturday and today.  No matter; it will pass.

I see that of the three big projects I listed in my agenda for this year, I didn't get to even one.  That's not terrible, because two of them had been on the back burner for several years anyway.  Maybe this year.

But one thing I can do, and that's to post a small supplement to my post on my unease with the word "tribalism," as used by left and progressive bloggers.  After I wrote it, I came across a book called Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind by Curtis Keim, published by Westview Press in 1999.  It's a reasonably short and accessible account of the ways Americans, white and to a lesser extent black, invent an Africa they want to believe in, rather than the Africa that is there. There's an entire chapter devoted to the word and concept of "tribe," and it confirms my sense that "tribal" and "tribalism," as used by white progressives, have racist overtones.

Keim writes that words like "nation," "people," and "tribe"

began to diverge in meaning in the late eighteenth century.  Europeans, who increasingly thought of themselves as more advanced than other peoples, needed words to distinguish themselves from others.  The word people retained its general usage, but nations came to thought of as larger groupings with more complex social structures and technologies.  The word tribes was reserved for groups that were smaller and, supposedly, simpler and less evolved.  Our modern ideas about primitives and the Dark Continent emerged in the same era.  By the mid-nineteenth century, the word tribe had assumed a negative meaning that implied political organizations that were primordial, backward, irrational, and static.  A person didn't join a tribe; one was born into it.  People in civilized societies could actively select from among different, creative courses of action, but tribal people followed tribal customs without thinking.  It was indeed fortunate for tribes that they had such customs to guide their actions, because members were so limited intellectually.  Of course, "tribalism" was expected of such people.  In other words, to be tribal was to be genetically incapable of more advanced thought or political organizations.

In the twentieth century, the meaning of the word tribe, as it applied to Africa, developed in two directions.  The first, favored by white politicians and colonial administrators, was a variation of the nineteenth-century definition of tribes as having closed boundaries and unchanging customs.  This was administratively useful because it allowed colonialists to make sense of an create order out of the bewildering variety of African political organizations ...

The second direction in the development of the word tribe was favored by anthropologists.  In the 1920s, anthropologists began to live with Africans and to take their day-to-day lives more seriously.  Their experiences revealed that the nineteen-century definition of tribe was deeply flawed.  They found that tribal peoples were neither unthinking nor less evolved than Westerners.  And they learned that tribes were constantly changing and adapting, just as were their own societies.  Anthropologists have sometimes been called servants of colonialism, because they provided the information and categories necessary to organize African people.  Although this negative label has some validity, it is also true that anthropologists were among the first to recognize that African complexity was creative rather than irrational and chaotic [99-101].

This history explains why the use of "tribal" as a putdown bothers me: it draws on nineteenth-century racist notions of "natives" as less "evolved," less intelligent and rational, and unable to think for themselves, but also as a different kind ("race") of person.  It also implies that non-tribalists are more evolved, smarter, and bold independent thinkers, though the leftish writers who use "tribal" this way would be properly contemptuous of the Europeans who thought they were a better breed than the dusky-hued people they tried to subjugate.  (And these same leftish writers are anticolonialist and anti-imperialist to a man.)  But this only shrinks the circle of evolved, intelligent, independent thinkers; it doesn't abolish the circle altogether.  There's still a "tribe" of Real Smart People in there, smug in their disdain for the lesser tribes.

(There's another side to this: I've noticed some intelligent American Indian writers and scholars who seem to accept the notion of tribes as timeless, ahistorical, uniform, and unchanging in their customs because the Elders know best.  None of them, I think, would actually want to live in such a society, but it's a comforting fantasy.)

I admit that I've been susceptible to this same tendency, especially as a lonely young bookworm and sissy.  It was very comforting to think of myself as part of an elite corps of Homo Superior, just waiting for our moment to emerge from the shadows and manifest our glory  It's a tendency I've worked to get free of, though I don't think it's possible for a human being to be completely free of it.  We're a social species, and there will always be Usses and Thems in our lives.  The question is how we treat the Thems.

I also admit that the use of "tribal" by these writers probably hurts no one.  It disturbs me mainly because it looks to me like a faultline in their politics and their thinking.  It disturbed me, but entertained me even more, when one of the writers in question and his Posse defended his use of "tribal" in the same way overt racists defend their practice: by accusing me of petty Political Correctness and Thought-Police tendencies, plus of course they couldn't have said anything racist, it's all in my imagination.  The writer's other line of defense was almost as funny: he cited the writer from whom he'd picked up this sense of "tribalism" as Authority.  (It's on the Internet, so it must be true!)  I consider this to be further evidence of how such groupthink erodes one's ability to think.

There are other words that could be used instead of "tribalism."  "Groupthink," for example.   Or more specific ones, like "party loyalty."  There are surely others  But it's so much easier to have a handy catchphrase, not too vulgar, for flogging one's ideological enemies.

Dance, Dude, Dance

It just entered my mind that Forbes magazine published Dinesh D'Souza's piece on Barack Obama's "Kenyan anti-colonialist mindset" simply for the pleasure of watching the liberals fuss about refuting it. The President is so fit to eat with the hogs! He is not anti-colonialist! But wait -- it's good to be anti-colonialist, so he must be anti-colonialist after all! I mean ... It's an entertaining spectacle, one that repeats itself from administration to administration. It happened during the Clinton administration, and it happened in South Korea when the Right there went after late President Noh Mu-hyeon.

It's a mistake, of course, to suppose that the good folks at Forbes are that clever. Back in the early 1970s Philip Roth wrote some hopefully satirical pieces for the New York Review of Books, later collected in book form as Our Gang, which depicted the Nixon White House as a gang of sinisterly knowing conspirators. It was a long time ago, so I can't remember who it was that pointed out that when the White House recordings were released, they revealed the Nixon gang to be a bunch of clumsy, malignant but not very competent thugs who wished they were sinisterly knowing conspirators. Which, considering all the Obama fans who assured the wavering faithful that the President was playing eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents, is a decent fit with the Obama administration too. Obama's problem is that he just doesn't play eleven-dimensional chess very well.

Nor do his supporters. Vide this guy (via), who does a game job of refuting D'Souza's multifarious lies and distortions. In order to do so, though, he has to dredge up some of Obama's lies and distortions. D'Souza claimed that Obama doesn't believe in American exceptionalism (i.e., is not fit to eat with the hogs). Ryan Chittum has to show that Obama does believe in American exceptionalism (i.e., is fit to eat with the hogs). To which end he quotes the Prez in noxious gasbag mode, showing that Obama doesn't understand (or chooses to misunderstand) what American exceptionalism means (though, like many abstractions, it does have different meanings to different people, which makes D'Souza's charge even more pointless). In practice "American exceptionalism" means the belief that when the US does the same horrible things as our official enemies, it's regrettable but doesn't mean we're bad, because we're different thanks to our historical values, and anyway, while we may have made some tragic blunders, our virtues outweigh our defects. Obama said:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

That's very nice, though it elides the uncomfortable fact that our troops have not defended the US in my lifetime, and have generally been sacrificed in aggressive wars, killing and maiming millions of people who never harmed the US. Aside from that, any imperialist state makes the same claims. Rome brought civilization to the barbarians. The European invaders of the Americas brought Christianity to the benighted Indian savages who -- typical -- didn't appreciate the Europeans' sacrifices; it's not like they benefited from their thankless mission. Ditto for the English in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in the Philippines and Latin America. The Nazis sacrificed to preserve Christian civilization from Jews and Communists, taking over France and numerous other countries for their own good. The Soviet Union sacrificed to protect the freedom-loving peoples of the world from capitalist imperialism.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

The Constitution may well be "exceptional," though not in the sense meant by "American exceptionalism." And that "core set of values" is honored more in the breach than in the observance, with Obama himself tirelessly working to undermine them. But that's okay -- those values are there to be admired for their exceptionalism, not observed!

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

It would be interesting to know some examples of times that Obama thinks the US has compromised in dealing with other nations. (Other than Israel.)

And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can’t solve these problems alone.

The US has not led the world towards peace and prosperity; it has overthrown or tried to overthrow numerous elected governments, invaded numerous countries or sponsored mercenaries to do the dirty work for us, and imposed destructive and immiserating economic policies that have created poverty not prosperity -- except for tiny elites like those who benefit in the US itself. Only a corrupt, undemocratic regime would collaborate with a murderous invading army, so of course the Obama administration works with the Karzai government while complaining that it's corrupt and undemocratic.

Chittum's comment on this quotation: "Apparently, D’Souza thinks that anyone who doesn’t think we should impose our views on the world or who thinks other countries have patriots, too, is a loinclothed, communist Luo tribesman hiding behind a Western suit and tie." Nice, but Obama doesn't believe that those who fight us are "patriots," or that we shouldn't impose our views on the world, if it's for their own good. I'd no sooner take Obama at his word than I'd take, say, D'Souza at his.

Whether or not Forbes's editors were deliberately being mischievous, they could hardly have been under any illusions about the quality of D'Souza's scholarship. ... Oh, damn, I know, of course they could have. D'Souza keeps getting published, often by liberal or "liberal" publications like The Atlantic, even though he always keeps getting discredited as a liar and a fraud. The corporate media have welcomed right-wing know-nothings all along, treating Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell (among so many others) as competent, responsible commentators and spokesmen, often in the name of "journalistic balance." Just as liberals will fall for the latest well-spoken, halfway young, halfway glamorous politician with progressive-sounding slogans and Republican politics, and defend him energetically against all criticism.

Oh well, it's up to each person to decide how to use his or her energies. But really, is it such a good idea to spend one's energy defending a lying corporate hack who is more concerned with protecting the executive branch against any limits on its power, extending US aggression and terror, and attacking most gleefully his critics on the left? I'd think it would be better to work on finding ways to undermine both the far right (Obama's Bush-era politics) and the extreme far right. Trying to defend Obama against charges that he's a leftist just seems to me to be a distraction.