Reference no: EM133418831

Question :- Explain the concept of The Division of Labour as discussed in this course. What were the reasons Marx thought it was a negative development in the history of humankind? Explain how Stanley Milgram linked the idea of the Division of Labour to the results of his shock experiment and also to the Nazi holocaust. What does The Banality of Evil mean? Give an example of the Banality of Evil from your own experience or make one up. (Be careful that it is not just an example of everyday evil but of what the Banality of Evil meant in terms of Arendt's observation of Eichmann and Milgram's observations of the people in his experiment. Also bdoe careful not to make it too big and "un-banal" - for instance, soldiers killing children or something. It should be something from everyday life, like the workplace, one's family, peer groups, etc)

Case Study: The Industrial Revolution

People in the 19th and 20th centuries developed a suspicion of progress that stays with many of us today. This suspicion was largely focussed on the technological advances that are collectively referred to as The Industrial Revolution. From the 1700s on, advances in scientific knowledge and engineering know-how led to the increasing importance of machines in human existence. The age of machines has been an important era in human technology, and one that continues today.

With the success of the machines came a tendency to think of all things - including the universe, nature, and human beings themselves - as "machines" of a sort, and for many people this mechanistic view of the world became a replacement for the religious and organic attitudes toward life that had come before. Medieval people throughout Europe conceived the world as an enchanted place, a place imbued with intangible spirit; modern Westerners are more likely to think of it as a complicated machine, one that can be understood, engineered, repaired, or modified. One that can be used and exploited and controlled.

From the start there has been anxiety over the machines and the mechanistic view of the world. Those who want to believe that human existence is special, important, and valuable in itself have questioned the wisdom as well as the accuracy of seeing ourselves and our world as machines. They worry about the consequences both of treating humans as a sort of machine, and also the effect that spending so much time with the machines themselves has on us. How does our reliance on machines change who we think we are, how we live, and how we think? This week we will take a closer look at the Industrial Revolution and the radical changes it brought about in one particular aspect of human life: work.

The Mechanization of Work

Among the most obvious and some would say crucial ways in which machines have changed human life are in the area of work. Machines have made countless jobs and forms of work obsolete; they have been responsible for the creation of new jobs, and have made other kinds of labour much easier or less dangerous than they used to be. They have taken away work from humans, but they have also created new work. Most people are thankful that machines have made the exhausting toil that was the fate of many workers in the past a distant memory in most of the developed world.

Despite the advantages that machines have provided in terms of efficiency, decrease of toil, taking over of repetitive tasks, and - at least in theory - freeing up time for more "creative" work for humans, the machines have led to two basic problems for humans as well. These "down sides" of mechanization have led some of the world's greatest minds to regret the ascendency of the machine. The two most painful effects of the machine age, at least where work is concerned, have been (1) the replacement of humans by machines, putting endless generations of skilled labourers and craftspeople out of jobs and often leaving them destitute, and (2) the increasing readiness to see human beings in various jobs as human "machines," the expectation of machine-like work from non-machines, and the increasing tendency to treat human workers the same way we treat unthinking, unfeeling mechanical devices.

Both of these practices have typically led to greater profit for the businessmen and more affordable goods for at least some factions of humanity, but at the same time they have radically changed the fabric of human existence, and some even today would argue that the human cost of these advances has been grossly underestimated.

Replacing people with machines

Machines have obvious advantages over human workers. They can work long hours without tiring; they don't need breaks; their work tends to be consistent and predictable; they do what you tell them to; they don't make mistakes, get sick, die, complain, go on strike, act out of malice - they don't have feelings. Do human workers have any advantages over machines? Purely from the point of view of efficiency one might be inclined to think not.

So as capitalism and technology advanced, it became increasingly attractive to those running manufacturing and other businesses to replace human workers with machines wherever possible. As they did, however, the very fabric of human existence was gradually torn apart. We went from a world where all of the goods in it were made or harvested by human hands, and held the traces of the human touch, to one where our goods often show no sign of human intervention. Work changed, and there was less chance for a human being to "put a piece of themselves" into the product of their labour. On the contrary, human beings were now encouraged to become less human at work, more like machines.

When we look at the human costs of the Industrial Revolution, the "fabric" of human life is indeed the operative metaphor. The earliest casualties of the Machine Age were those who worked in the textile industry - skilled weavers above all. You may have heard people who don't like new technology - someone who refuses to get a smartphone, for instance - referred to as Luddites. Let me fill you in on Ned Ludd and the Luddites, who always sound to me like they would have made a hell of a punk band.