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For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical worl… - Lewis Mumford
" "For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers. This order of change is as hard for most people to conceive as was the change from the classic power complex of Imperial Rome to that of Christianity, or, later, from supernatural medieval Christianity to the machine-modeled ideology of the seventeenth century. But such changes have repeatedly occurred all through history; and under catastrophic pressure they may occur again. Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
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About Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian of technology and science, also noted for his study of cities.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Additional quotes by Lewis Mumford
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.
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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.
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