Page 48 - The Drucker Lectures

4

The First Technological Revolution

and Its Lessons

1965

ware that we are living in the midst of a technological
Arevolution, we are becoming increasingly concerned with
its meaning for the individual and its impact on freedom, on
society, and on our political institutions. Side by side with messi-
anic promises of utopia to be ushered in by technology, there are
the most dire warnings of man’s enslavement by technology, his
alienation from himself and from society, and the destruction of
all human and political values.
Tremendous though today’s technological explosion is, it is
hardly greater than the first great revolution technology wrought
in human life 7,000 years ago when the first great civilization
of man, the irrigation civilization, established itself. First in
Mesopotamia, and then in Egypt and in the Indus Valley, and
finally in China, there appeared a new society and a new pol-
ity: the irrigation city, which then rapidly became the irrigation
empire. No other change in man’s way of life and in his making
a living, not even the changes underway today, so completely
revolutionized human society and community. In fact, the ir-
rigation civilizations were the beginning of history, if only be-
cause they brought writing. The age of the irrigation civilization
was preeminently an age of technological innovation. Not until

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