Page 51 - The Drucker Lectures

32 [ The Drucker Lectures

have understood the term, and that until today history largely
consisted of building on the foundations laid 5,000 or more years
ago. In fact, one can argue that human history, in the last 5,000
years, has largely been an extension of the social and political
institutions of the irrigation city to larger and larger areas—that
is, to all areas of the globe where water supply is adequate for the
systematic tilling of the soil.
The irrigation civilization was based squarely upon a techno-
logical revolution. It can, with justice, be called a “technological
polity.” All its institutions were responses to opportunities and
challenges that new technology offered. All its institutions were
essentially aimed at making the new technology most productive.
So, what can we learn from the first technological revolution
regarding the impacts likely to result on man, his society, and
his government from the new industrial revolution, the one we
are living in? Does the story of the irrigation civilization show
man to be determined by his technical achievements, in thrall to
them, coerced by them? Or does it show him capable of using
technology to human ends and of being the master of the tools
of his own devising?
Without a shadow of doubt, major technological change cre-
ates the need for social and political innovation. It does make
obsolete existing institutional arrangements. It does require new
and very different institutions of community, society, and gov-
ernment. To this extent there can be no doubt: Technological
change of a revolutionary character coerces; it demands innova-
tion—specific social and political innovation.
In other words, one lesson to be learned from the first tech-
nological revolution is that new technology creates what a phi-
losopher of history might call “objective reality.” And objective
reality has to be dealt with on its terms. Such a reality would, for
instance, be the conversion, in the course of the first technologi-
cal revolution, of human space from “habitat” into “settlement”—