Lewis Mumford Quotes

The point I am making is that if craftsmanship had not been condemned to death by starvation wages and meager profits, if it had, in fact, been protected and subsidized as so many of the new mechanical industries were in fact extravagantly subsidized, right down to the jet planes and rockets today, our technology as a whole, even that of 'fine technics' would have been immensely richer-and more efficient.

It is only at a high stage of individuation, made possible at first by the painted or carved image, the written symbol, and the printed book, that true freedom-the freedom to escape from the passing moment and the present visible place, to challenge past experience or modify future action-can be achieved. To be aware only of immediate stimuli and immediate sensations is a medical indication of brain injury.

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.

When an ideology conveys such universal meanings and commands such obedience, it has become, in fact, a religion, and its imperatives have the dynamic force of a myth. Those who would question its principles or defy its orders do so at their peril, as groups of rebellious workers continued to discover for the next three or four centuries. From the nineteenth century on, this refurbished religion united thinkers of the most diverse temperaments, backgrounds, and superficial beliefs: minds as different as Marx and Ricardo, Carlyle and Mill, Comte and Spencer, subscribed to its doctrines; and from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, the working classes, finding themselves helpless to resist these new forces, countered the capitalist and militarist expressions of this myth with myths of their own-those of socialism, anarchism, or communism-under which the machine would be exploited, not for a ruling elite, but for the benefit of the proletarian masses. Against this machine-conditioned utopia only a handful of heretics, mostly poets and artists, dared to hold out.

But if tools were actually central to mental growth beyond purely animal needs, how is it that those primitive peoples, like the Australian Bushmen, who have the most rudimentary technology, nevertheless exhibit elaborate religious ceremonials, an extremely complicated kinship organization, and a complex and differentiated language? Why, further, were highly developed cultures, like those of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Peruvians, still using only the simplest handicraft equipment, though they were capable of constructing superbly planned works of engineering and architecture, like the road to Machu Pichu and Machu Pichu itself? And how is it that the Maya, who had neither machines nor draught animals, were not only great artists but masters of abstruse mathematical calculations.

In Ahab and in his beatnik, quasi-criminal prototype, Jackson (in 'Redburn'), Melville gave expression both to the megatechnic 'Khans' of the global Pentagon and to the counter-forces they had brought into being. And the fact that Ahab's torment and hatred had gone so far that he had lost control of himself and, through his own mad reliance upon power, had become dominated completely by the creature that had disabled him, only makes Melville's story a central parable in the interpretation of modern man's destiny. In Ahab's throwing away compass and sextant at the height of the chase, Melville even anticipated the casting out of the orderly instruments of intelligence, so characteristic of the counter-culture and anti-life happenings of today. Similarly, by his maniacal concentration, Ahab rejects the inner change that might have saved the ship and the crew, when he turns a deaf ear to the pleas of love uttered by sober Starbuck in words and by Pip, a fright-shocked child and an African primitive, in dumb gesture.

Outwardly mankind is still committed tot he grim chase Melville described, lured by the adventure, the prospect of oil and whalebone, the promptings of pride, an above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power. But it has also begun consciously to face the prospect of total annihilation, which may be brought about by the captains who now have command of the ship.

We've seen that even in the simplest situations nonlinearities can interfere with a linear approach to aggregates. That point holds in general: nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.

Here, then, is the utopian life-span. Twenty-one years of nurture and education, that is, conditioning: three years of forced labor at the more disagreeable tasks and services: twenty years at a favored profession or vocation, as and where indicated by the national government; and finally, compulsory retirement after forty-five, with the remaining years of life devoted to leisure undiluted by any other duty than public work. Since there are no gradations of income in this society, the chief rewards for outstanding service are honors, status, authority, power. By taking the constitution of the United States as a model, the President of the Country became commander-in-chief of the industrial army; and since this army is in constant being, the political system is plainly that of a dictatorship: in effect, this mode of economic organization committed the country to a perpetual Cold War.

The shepherd may in fact be looked upon as the spiritual brother of the hunter, his better self, stressing the protective rather than the predatory function.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the efficiency of the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.

If the new world exploration did not come to anything like its happy expected fulfillment even in North America, where the odds were more favorable, it was because the new colonizers and settlers brought so much of the Old World in their refined equipment and their brutal customs with them. The wonder is rather that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, for some of its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many of our contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies, planning further voyages through outer space. Contemporary 'space age' prophets, who proclaim space exploration as the endless frontier and astronauts as the coming pioneers, throw an unrealistic glamour over both the past, and even more, the future of such efforts.

Efflorescence is an archetypal example of nature's untrammeled creativity; and the fact that floral beauty cannot be explained or justified on purely utilitarian grounds is precisely what makes this explosion so wonderful-and so typical of other life-processes. Biological creativity and the esthetic creativity that so often accompanies it exist for their own sake and transcend the organism's earlier limitations. If survival were all that mattered, life might have remained in the primal ooze or crept no further upward than the lichens. Though one may abstractly conceive a world with neither colors nor any richness of living structures, that muted world is not the actual world of life.