Lewis Mumford Quotes

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

Primitive man's life in Hobbes' famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes' ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king's will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves.

"If words had crystallized as they were spoken, and left deposits like shells or shards, the paleontologist would hardly have paid any attention to early man's tool-making: the brittle deposits of words, in all their formative stages, would have commanded his attention, though the sheer mass of these verbal midden heaps would have overwhelmed him, and he would have been as baffled over interpreting the living structure of meaning as linguists still are by the Etruscan remains.

As it turned out, the most impalpable and evanescent of man's creations before writing was invented, the mere breath of his mind, has turned out to be the most formative human achievement: every other subsequent advance in human culture, even tool-making, depended upon it. Language not merely opened the doors of the mind to consciousness, but partly closed the cellar door to the unconsciuos and restricted the access of the ghosts and demons of that underworld to the increasingly well-ventilated and lighted chambers of the upper stories. That this vast inner transformation could ever have been neglected, and the radical changes it effected could have been attributed to tool-making, seems now an incredible oversight.

As Leslie White has put it, "The ability to symbol, primarily in its expression in articulate speech, is the basis and substance of all human behavior. It was the means by which culture was brought into existence and the means of its perpetuation since the origin of man." That 'universe of discourse' was man's earliest model of the universe itself."

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

To accept the Church's monopoly of the subjective life, or to surrender it to muddled magic and vulgar superstition, was to set limits to the examination of human experience and the pursuit of truth. The inner life could not remain forever a no-man's land, where saints, gypsies, lords, beggars, artists, and lunatics had established squatters' rights and wasted precious human energy erecting an endless series of crazy, flimsy structures. In turning his back on the realities of subjective life, Descartes rejected the possibility of creating a unified world picture that would do justice to every aspect of human experience-that indispensable pre-condition for the 'next development of man.

This New World utopia, this promised land, was soon buried under the ashes and cinders that erupted over the Western World in the nineteenth century, thanks tot he resurrection and intensification of all the forces that had originally brought 'civilization' itself into existence. The rise of the centralized state, teh expansion of the bureaucracy and the conscript army, the regimentation of the factory system, the depredations of speculative finance, the spread of imperialism, as in the Mexican War, and the continued encroachment of slavery-all these negative movements not only sullied the New World dream but brought back on a larger scale than ever the Old World nightmares that the immigrants to America had risked their lives and forfeited their cultural treasures to escape.

On one hand the Christian missionaries sought to convert the heathen, by fire and sword if need be, to the gospel of peace, brotherhood, and heavenly beatitude; on the other, the more venturesome spirits wished to throw off the constraining traditions and customs, and begin life afresh, levelling distinctions of class, eliminating superfluities and luxuries, privileges and distinctions, and hierarchical rank. In short, to go back to the Stone Ages, before the institutions of Bronze Age civilization had crystallized. Though the Western hemisphere was indeed inhabited, and many parts of it were artfully cultivated, so much of it was so sparsely occupied that the European thought of it as a virgin continent against whose wildness he pitted his manly strength. In one mood the European invaders preached the Christian gospel to the native idolaters, subverted them with strong liquors, forced them to cover their nakedness with clothes, and worked them to an early death in mines; in another, the pioneer himself took on the ways of the North American Indian, adopted his leather costume, and reverted to the ancient paleolithic economy: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish and berries, revelling in the wilderness and its solitude, defying orthodox law and order, and yet, under pressure, improvising brutal substitutes. The beauty of that free life still haunted Audubon in his old age.

Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l'expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de l'homme.

The individual contribution, the work of any single generation, is infinitesimal; the power and glory belong to human society at large, and are the long result of selection, conservation, sacrifice, creation, and renewal — the outcome of endless brave efforts to conserve values and ideas, and to hand them on to posterity, along with physical life itself. Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back into an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.

Let us confess it: the human situation is always desperate.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

Creativity begins in the unconscious; and its first human manifestation is the dream.

If, as many anthropologists still hold, the making and using of tools as one of the chief sources of primitive man's intellectual development, is it not time that we asked ourselves what will happen to man if he departs as completely as he now threatens to do from his primal polytechnic occupations? Since they can no longer be pursued at a profit, perhaps they will have to be restored as modes of sport and recreation, even more as helpful — increasingly essential — forms of personal service and mutual aid.

Vacuum pumps driven by electric motors are forced into American households for the purpose of cleaning an obsolete form of floor covering, the carpet or the rug, whose appropriateness for use in interiors, if it did not disappear with the caravans where it originated, certainly passed out of existence with rubber heels and steam-heated houses. To count such pathetic examples of waste to the credit of the machine is like counting the rise in the number of constipation remedies a proof of the benefits of leisure.