Lewis Mumford Quotes

When the moment comes to replace power with plenitude, compulsive external rituals with internal, self-imposed discipline, depersonalization with individuation, automation with autonomy, we shall find that the necessary change of attitude and purpose has been going on beneath the surface during the last century, and the long buried seeds of a richer human culture are now ready to strike root and grow, as soon as the ice breaks up and the sun reaches them. IF that growth is to prosper, it will draw freely on the compost from many previous cultures. When the power complex itself becomes sufficiently etherialized, its formative universal ideas will become usable again, passing on its intellectual vigor and its discipline, once applied mainly to the management of things, to the management and enrichment of man's whole subjective existence.

Collective military aggression, I submit, is as much a special invention of civilization as is the collective expression of curiosity through systematic scientific investigation. The fact that human beings are naturally curious did not lead inevitably to organized science; and the fact that they are given to anger and pugnacity was not sufficient in itself to create the institution of war. The latter, like science, is an historic, culture-bound achievement-witness to a much more devious connection between complexity, crisis, frustration, and aggression. Here the ants have more to teach us than the apes- or the supposedly combative 'cave man', whose purely imaginary traits strangely resemble those of a nineteenth-century capitalist enterpriser.

More than one recent observer has pointed out that the prospective achievement of universal leisure, with the six-hour day and the five-day week, carries the threat of intolerable emptiness and boredom. The hope expressed by Julian Huxley and others that this vacancy will be profitably filled by continued studies in the school and the university, to use the time once occupied by office or factory work, over-rates both the attraction and the nutritive value of such fare, and fails to take note of the ominous rebellion against it already manifested by those college students who find no joy in exercising their minds, and who would rather dull them by drugs or stone them by violent sounds.

"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."

"From the fourth century on, the stelae and monuments of the great kings abound in insensate boasts of power and vain threats against those who might ransack their tombs or deface their inscriptions-events that nevertheless repeatedly took place. Like Marduk in the Akkadian version of the Creation Epic, the new Bronze Age kings mounted their chariots "irresistible and terrifying," "versed in ravage, in destruction skilled...wrapped in an armor of terror." With such sick-making sentiments we are still all too familiar: they are mimicked in the nuclear press releases of the Pentagon.

Such constant assertions of power were doubtless efforts to make conquest easy by terrifying the enemy beforehand. But they also testify to an increase of irrationality, almost proportional to the instruments of destruction that were available: something we have seen again in our own time. This paranoia was so methodical that the conqueror, on more than one occasion, would level a city to the ground, only to build it again immediately on the same site, thus demonstrating his ambivalent role as destroyer-creator, or devil-god, in one."

Now the equipment, organization, and tactics of an army were not achieved overnight: one must allow for a period of transition before a large mass of men could be trained to operate under unified command. Until towns arose and population was sufficiently concentrated, the prelude to war was an organized but one-sided display of power and bellicosity in raiding expeditions for wood, malachite, gold, slaves.

Presently the recruiting sergeant was not able to use the children of this regime even as cannon fodder: the Boer War and the First World War, did perhaps as much as any other factor to promote better housing there.

In surrendering unconditionally to the power system, with its 'automation of automation,' modern man has forfeited some of the inner resources necessary to keep him alive: above all, animal faith in his own capacity to survive and to reproduce his kind, biologically, historically, and culturally. In the act of dismissing the past he has undermined his faith in the future; for it is only by their convergence in his present consciousness that he can preserve continuity through change and embrace change without forfeiting continuity. This and nothing less is the 'way of life.

Such freedom as is granted by this society is the freedom given to conscript soldiers on leave; and no provision whatever is made for conscientious objectors, or for those who would work against the system. The American farmer who lately rebelled against legislation preventing him from growing more than his allotted quota of grain even to feed his own hogs found when he migrated to distant Australia in search of freedom that he had made only one mistake: even in that seemingly open and independent continent he was subject to a similar set of imbecile regulations.

Lonely courage played a part that mass obedience to the leader's command could never rival. Such courage produced heroes of the mind as well as of the battlefield, often in the same person.

If we note attentively the aberrations of the ruling classes throughout history, we shall see how far most of them were from understanding the limitations of mere physical power, and of a life that centered upon an effortless consumption: the reduced life of the parasite on a tolerant host. The boredom of satiety dogged this economy of surplus power and surplus goods from the very beginning: it led to insensate personal luxury and ever more insensate acts of collective delinquency and destruction. Both were means of establishing the superior status of the ruling minority, whose desires knew no limits and whose very crimes turned into Nietzschean virtues.

"Now compare this mechanical world view, with its exclusive emphasis on the quantitative, the measurable, the external, with that of one of the most primitive of known races and cultures, the Australian aborigines. According to a recent interpreter, Kaj Birket-Smith, "The fundamental idea in the Australian's concept of life is that there is no sharp division between man and nature, between the quick and the dead, nor even a gap between past, present, and future. Nature can as little exist without man as man without nature, and yesterday and tomorrow, in a manner inexplicable to us, merge into today.

Whatever the deficiencies in the Australian aborigine's habits of observation or in his symbolic formulation of his experience, it will become plain, as the theme of this book develops, that the Australian's 'primitive' view is in fact far less primitive, biologically and culturally speaking, than that of the mechanical world picture,f or it includes those many dimensions of life that Kepler, Galileo, and their successors intentionally excluded, as spoiling the accuracy of their observations and the elegance of their descriptions.

Psychologically healthy people have no need to indulge fantasies of absolute power; nor do they need to come to terms with reality by inflicting self-mutilation and prematurely courting death. But the critical weakness of an over-regimented institutional structure-and almost by definition 'civilization' was over-regimented from the beginning-is that it does not tend to produce psychologically healthy people. The rigid division of labor and the segregation of castes produce unbalanced characters, while the mechanical routine normalizes-and rewards-those compulsive personalities who are afraid to cope with the embarrassing riches of life.

Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human!

The obstacle to achieving such vocational diversification and general aptitude does not lie in the human character as such, but rather in the mass of qualifying educational and vocational restrictions imposed by every privileged group in order to maintain its special status, emoluments, and perquisites. Though the reputed object of these regulations is often laudable, as measures to ensure competence and protect members from unqualified rivals, the underlying aim is to prevent fresh activities and organizations from arising in competition with the power system. As a result, the scope of human initiative through direct action becomes limited: today the smallest new measure must run a gauntlet of licensing laws, professional codes, trades union regulations, wage schedules, promotion priorities, bureaucratic restrictions and inspections. Even the exigencies of war were only partly able to break down or bypass these barriers-for where are they more deeply entrenched than in the military machine itself?

This explains, perhaps, why there is so little prospect of overcoming the defects of the power system by any attack that employs mass organizations and mass efforts at persuasion; for these mass methods support the very system they attack. The changes that have so far been effective, and that give promise of further success, are those that have been initiated by animated individual minds, small groups, and local communities nibbling at the edges of the power structure by breaking routines and defying regulations. Such an attack seeks, not to capture the citadel of power, but to withdraw from it and quietly paralyze it. Once such initiatives become widespread, as they at last show signs of becoming, it will restore power and confident authority to its proper source: the human personality and the small face-to-face community.