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 pe… - Lewis Mumford

The word 'year' is meaningless as applied to a physical system by itself: it is not the stars or the planets that experience years, still less measure them, but man. This very observation is the result of man's attention to recurrent movements, seasonable events, biological rhythms, measurable sequences. When the idea of a year is projected back upon the physical universe, it tells something further that is important to man: otherwise, it is a poetic fiction.

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.

What was happily proved by this early revolution is something that we perhaps need to be reminded of again today: that neither exact science nor engineering is proof against the irrationality of those that operate the system. Above all, that the strongest and most efficient of megamachines can be overthrown, that human errors are not immortal. The collapse of the Pyramid Age proved that the megamachine exists on a basis of human beliefs, which may crumble, of human decisions, which may prove fallible, and human consent, which, when the magic becomes discredited, may be withheld. The human parts that composed the megamachine were by nature mechanically imperfect: never wholly reliable. Until real machines of wood and metal could be manufactured in sufficient quantity to take the place of most of the human components, the megamachine would remain vulnerable.