Lewis Mumford Quotes

The effort to eliminate the formative role of the mind, making the artifact more important than the artificer, reduces mystery to absurdity; and that affirmation of absurdity is the life-heresy of the present generation. This reductionism turns at last into the drooling blankness of 'Waiting for Godot' or 'Krapp's Last Tape,' with their representation of boredom and tedium as the inevitable climax of human existence. This in itself is a sardonic final commentary on the mechanical world picture, the power system, and the subjective non-values derived from them. For a technology that denies reality to the subjective life cannot claim any human value for even its own highest products.

"Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure."

Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from the "noisy crowing up of things and whatsoever wars on the divine" was one of the vital offerings of the classic religions: hence their emphasis was not on technological productivity but on personal poise. The old slogan of New York subway guards in handling a crush of passengers applies with even greater force to the tempo of megatechnic society: "What's your hurry...Watch your step!

What distinguishes language from isolated gestures and signs, no matter how numerous, is that it forms a complex ramifying structure, which in its conceptual entirety presents a Wiltbild or comprehensive symbolic framework capable of embracing many aspects of reality: not a static representation like a picture or a sculpture, but a moving picture of things, events, processes, ideas, purposes, in which every word is surrounded by a rich penumbra of original concrete experiences, and every sentence brings with it some degree of novelty, if only because time and place, intention and recipient, change its meaning. Contrary to Bergson, language is the least geometric, the least static; of all the arts.

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.

"Creativity is, by its nature, fitful and inconstant, easily upset by constraint, foreboding, insecurity, external pressure. Any great preoccupation with the problems of ensuring animal survival exhausts the energies and disturbs the receptivity of the sensitive mind. Such creativity as was first achieved in the city came about largely through an arrogation of the economic means of production and distribution by a small minority, attached to the temple and the palace. In the epic of creation Marduk remarks of man: "Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe." Shall we err greatly if we translate this as: "Let our subjects be burdened with daily toil that the king and the priesthood may freely breathe"?"

Material artifacts may stubbornly defy time, but what they tell about man's history is a good deal less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If the only clue to Shakespeare's achievement as a dramatist were his cradle, an Elizabethan mug, his lower jaw, and a few rotted planks from the Globe Theatre, one could not even dimly imagine the subject matter of his plays, still less guess in one's wildest moments what a poet he was. Though we would still be far from justly appreciating Shakespeare, we should nevertheless have a better notion of his work through examining the known plays of Shaw and Yeats and reading backward.

Within a few centuries, the new capitalist spirit challenged the basic Christian ethic: the boundless ego of Sir Gales Overreach and his fellows in the marketplace had no room for charity or love in any of their ancient senses. The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity-pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust-into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as 'bad for business,' except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.

Even in the eighteenth century, before either the French Revolution or the paleotechnic revolution had been consummated, it had become the fashion to discredit municipal authorities and to sneer at local interests. In the newly organized states, even those based on republican principles, only matters of national moment, organized by political parties, counted in men’s hopes or dreams.

"For while a whole day spent in gardening is the best of anodynes and the most benign of soporifics, the higher functions of the mind go to sleep after all heavy work: indeed physical fatigue has done more to prevent rebellions against the harsh exactions of daily work than either strong drink or brute pressure. Even the benign Emerson could say shrewdly about the immigrant labor gangs which build the first railroads, toiling at starvation pay for fifteen or sixteen hours a day: "It served better than the police to preserve order.

Every attempt to give objective reality to the billions of years the cosmos supposedly passed through before man appeared, secretly smuggles a human observer into the statement, for it is man's ability to think backwards and forwards that creates and counts and reckons with those years. Without man's time-keeping activities, the universe is yearless, as without his spatial conceptions, without his discovery of forms, patterns, rhythms, it is an insensate, formless, timeless, meaningless void. Meaning lives and dies with man, or rather, with the creative process that brought him into existence and gave him a mind.

As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself.

Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money.

What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-c

But we must not overlook the vital connection between all physical movement and the acquisition of speech, for this has now been established independently by psychologists. In the case of children whose speech has been retarded or has become disordered, they have found that the child's ability to handle words can be recovered by re-training his motor behavior through inducing him to resume the earlier posture of crawling, the stage that usually accompanies, or slightly precedes, the first efforts at speech.

A good pursued too inflexibly may turn into a granite evil.

Now, the whole picture of 'backwardness' changes as soon as we cease to judge earlier technologies by the provincial standards of our own power-centered culture, with its worship of the machine, its respect for the uniform, the mass-produced, the mass-consumed, and with its disregard for individuality, variety and choice, except in strict conformity to the demands of the megamachine.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.