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Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and in… - Lewis Mumford
" "Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other: idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet "the happiness of man on earth" depends upon their combination.
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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
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.
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.
Galileo's mechanical world was only a partial representation of a finite number of probable worlds, each peculiar to a particular living species; and all these worlds are but a portion of the infinite number of possible worlds that may have once existed or may yet exist. But anything like a single world, common to all species, at all times, under all circumstances, is a purely hypothetical construction, drawn by inference from pathetically insufficient data, prized for the assurance of stability and intelligibility it gives, even though that assurance turns out, under severe examination, to be just another illusion. A butterfly or a beetle, a fish or a fowl, a dog or a dolphin, would have a different report to give even about primary qualities, for each lives in a world conditioned by the needs and environmental opportunities open to his species. In the gray visual world of the dog, smells, near and distant, subtle or violently exciting, probably play the part that colors do in man's world-though in the primal occupation of eating, the dog's world and man's world would approach each other more closely.
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