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Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divi… - Lewis Mumford
" "Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to t
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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
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.
In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”
"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."
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