ABSTRACT
One of the most enduring, yet least well understood, characterizations of American society is that it is mechanistic in nature. This reputation is not derived simply from the fact that so many of America's great bequests to the world have been new mechanical devices (e.g. telephone, computer) or new production techniques (e.g. assembly line, automation, mechanized agricultural production). It is rather that America is believed to have been so affected by the forms and purposes of mechanical processes that they have come to represent the principal features of American life. As a result, the United States is conventionally described as being the ‘culture of machine living’ 1 Mechanical metaphors (e.g. machine politics), mechanical concepts (e.g. countervailing force, domino theory), mechanical symbols (e.g. dynamo, railroad), and mechanical cults (e.g. automobiles, firearms, spacecraft) are conspicuously prominent in American life. American history has been described as not only a process by which ‘a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world's most productive industrial machine’, 2 but a process which in itself was prompted and directed by technological change — ‘technological determinism, as an inescapable aspect of the modern American way, has been an implicit American assumption’. 3 Accordingly, American society has often been either applauded or decried on the basis of whether the observer either condones a mechanized society as being dynamic, progressive, and emancipated or deplores it as being rootless, aimless, divisive, and spiritually arid. In both respects, the actual existence of a highly mechanistic society is assumed as a fact of American life.
