BUILDING, DWELLING, AND BEING

BUILDING, DWELLING, AND BEING

To Build a Home

This is what the LORD says: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?

- Isaiah 66:1

Outlines of a book I planned in 2008, but never had time to write. My books on Lewis Mumford and The City of Reason expand much of the material here. Many of the themes here are drawn from Mumford.

[THEME]

This far-ranging study sets out to delineate the origins, evolution, and present condition of civilisation, tracing the human condition through major breakthroughs in the arts, philosophy, science, and religion. The book draws on a diverse range of materials in an effort to show how the past grew into the present, making connections between a variety of disciplines to bring specialist insights together to form a moral synthesis. This morality is not some overarching ideal imposed upon the facts but is drawn from nature, human nature and experience in the co-evolution of both.

The study grounds social development in a moral sense of place and cultural evolution. The research focuses upon the connection between being and place, the moral meaning that human beings invest in the world around them as the rational evolution of the human ontology. The central theme is that of cities, citizenship and civilisation as the mutual unfolding of nature within and nature without, affirming the unity of human beings in society and of society and nature. The research incorporates evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology and ecology within a socio-philosophical perspective in order to make the progress of rationalisation responsible to moral values and conscious social control.

By taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book emphasises the interconnected nature of life on earth and rejects the idea that a single ideology is capable of encompassing the mind-straining diversity and complexity of life. The complexity and variety of life evades capture by system. In place of a single system, the book proposes a praxis philosophy of the open synthesis.

The unifying theme.

An examination of the processes connecting civilisation, urbanisation and communication via the relation of nature, culture and reason. The argument contrasts a balanced, decentralized civilization with an unbalanced civilisation which abstracts and centralises power, people, and place. The study addresses reason in its dual aspect, as repressive in alliance with regularity and regimentation and as emancipatory when in alliance with the enhancement of life.

The answer to these questions sets us on a trail which goes all the way back through the centuries to the earliest evidence of human behaviour.

The story begins in the prehistory of humanity.

[BUILDING AS SACRED ACTIVITY – SEARCH FOR AND RETURN TO HOME]

From ancient beginnings, built things were invested with positive meaning.

Prehistory and the dependence upon nature – a more positive attitude taken to the feminine. Cave paintings and worship and the connection with nature and goddess worship.

From the caves to cities and architecture as sacred sites – the origin of the city in the sacred.

Building was a sacred activity, protected by ritual in Egyptian times.

The Egyptian hieroglyph for city was the same as that for mother (Norberg-Shulz, 1971) - the good mother who looks after the children who pass back through her orifices and whose boundaries are not to be violated by strangers.

The conception of Return to the One.

Plotinus – the central idea of the philosophy of religion is that of return. All creation is disposed by nature to return to the source whence it came.

Link to a positive evaluation of the feminine and the need to restore the missing feminine. The missing feminine is also the missing masculine since the absence of the one skews and distorts the character of the other.

Alienation – things are invested with an existential significance as the human makers lose their existential being. The divorce between makers and made – loss of creation and loss of agency.

I build, therefore I am, could be the motto of Western man, who lives within what he constructs: hence the universal feminine designation of built things, extending all the way to that aggregate called the city and beyond to the nation itself.

[ARCHITECTURE ARCHAEOLOGY ANTHROPOLOGY TO URBANISATION]

To be is to build.

The old German root of the word 'to build' denotes both to the process of making, and of dwelling within. This was developed by Martin Heidegger (cited in Norberg-Shulz, 1971) into an association between the German root, buan, and the cognate, bin, to be

The built environment as a dwelling – one that corresponds to and enhances the human ontology rather than contradicts and inhibits it. An alienated environment is dingy, grimy, dull, hopeless and soulless. The absence of space, sunlight, and fresh air. The demand of humane architecture is to include all the human qualities.

Beyond behaviouralism to achieve a genuine union of the inner and the outer – the built as the expression of an inner character, a dwelling for the soul.

The connection of the built world, as a second nature, with first nature, nature within and nature without. From the dawn of civilisation, meaning and value was invested in the built world to control and regulate and exclude ‘bad’ nature and the human enemy whilst engendering a new, manipulable and manageable nature certifying human control. This is the phase of the first space conception – the human made volume in space that becomes becomes valued in itself, with no coherent notion of perspective or interior space.

The master-builder builds with words. The primacy of symbols, the world as a world of symbols – language, concepts, numbers, ideas. Cities, societies, civiliza­tions, cultures are built with ideas. Ideas reveal lesser builder where they have strayed and how they can return to the One.

[ORIGINS OF THE CITY]

Archaeology and anthropology – the emergence of the city in history.

The emergence of the city is to be dated around 3,000 years BCE and its causes are to be identified with the introduction of plow culture and large-scale irrigation projects. Urbanisation was the product of the agricultural revolution. The scattered instances of civic life which could be found dotting the great valley systems of East Asia and North Africa came to be concentrated inside the walls of the city.

[THE CITY AS SACRED SITE]

City as civilisation but both reason and the city are rooted in the sacred.

The hamlet, the shrine and the village predate the city and formed the core of the emerging city.

The story of the city begins in prehistory. Human evolution as an urbanisation originates in the Paleolithic shrines and burial places. Active civic life emerges from these homes of the gods and the ancestral spirits. The city is a sacred place connecting its inhabitants with the rhythms of life and death. Past, present and future are interconnected, with every living city being rooted in the city of the dead. The city as sacred functioned as a sanctuary, cemetery, and ritual centre which served to draw nomadic peoples together in a common place and purpose, citizens as pilgrims who gathered together in a spirit of awe and reverence.

Community and communication originated in this spiritual communion. The purpose of ritual was not a morbid worship of the past or the dead but the nurturing of the future. The sacred respect had a life-enhancing purpose—ritual, fellowship, family nurture—were extended into the Neolithic village, which formed the first real unit of settled associational life.

The Neolithic age was characterised by the role played by women as planters and food providers. The extent to which the key technology assumed female forms is significant. A masculine technics emphasises the bones and muscles of the male —spears, hammers, axes, and knives—a feminine technics emphasises the soft internal organs, containers for food and water—vats, pots, jars, bins, barns, cisterns, granaries, houses, and of great collective containers, like irrigation ditches and villages. Nurture and nature are integrated in a Neolithic culture characterised by agriculture, the domestication of animals and seed plants. The ability to store things brought continuity of life. The small containers grew in size to become the village, the container of people rooted in nature and nurture. The Neolithic village is a place of stability and security, communal cooperation, and face-to-face intimacy. Work was combined with play, and there was time for conversation, religious ritual, and sexual activity. A rough social and sexual equality prevailed.

[NEOLITHIC TO PALEOLITHIC - The transition from a feminine to a masculine culture]

The female integration of nature and nurture broke down with the assertion of the masculine drive to control nature, mastery as domination. Accompanying this assertion of control over nature was a claim to control human beings within society. This involved a predatory power on the part of some over other human groups. Here lies the origin of politics as the management and manipulation of masses by elites. Also politics as coercion and as martial. If feminine power rested upon the power of giving life, the masculine rule asserted control as the power over death. Ritual execution, human sacrifice, war and conflict all involved elites setting masses against each other.

The Neolithic village had a life-enhancing character in emphasising nurture, reproduction and planting. This age was followed by a masculine dominated age characterised by cities ruled by political and religious elites, kings, warriors and priests. The technical innovations of this age expressed the desire to dominate nature, the draw bow, the potter's wheel, exact astronomical observation, the calendar, and writing.

The transition from the village, expressing a harmony of feminine and masculine aspects, to the male-dominated city is a transition from a concern with nurture to a concern with technical mastery. The domination of nature without also involved the domination of human beings within society, a domination that was as psychological as it was political. The new political and religious elites employed not just physical force in exercising control but also psychological force, involving the masses in rituals of bloodshed, death and violence in order to let them know their place in the scheme of things. In the transition from the village to the city lies the origins of warfare, the city, the state, and the organization of work on mechanistic lines. The source of the dialectic of civilisation is located here.

The city and the process of civilization begins with technical innovations such as the plow and large-scale culti­vation of cereals in open fields. Behind these revolutionary techniques, however, is the emergence of new mode of social organization that set the context and direction of transformation—the institu­tion of kingship.

The emergence of the city coincided with the rise of rule by political and religious elites, the Paleolithic hunter-chieftain being elevated to deified kingship. The king is therefore the catalytic agent bringing about the first urban implosion through his drive for supreme power. Politics allied with religion in this assertion of elite rule. A new priestly class emerged, divorced from the communion of the people, and these invested the king with a cosmic authority. There followed a retinue of courtiers, generals, and palace bureaucrats who served to broadened the scope of the king’s imperium. The power of this deified kingship was symbolized in the built environment and architecture. The pyramids, ziggurats, palaces, and temples bedecked with ferocious-looking wild animals - lions, bulls, and eagles— were erected to honour the image of the ruler and to fill the hearts of the people with a respectful fear of kingly power. This was a form of physical and psychic terror designed to let people know that they were the ruled, the mass, subordinate to external purposes. The inhabitants of these first cities were not citizens, participators in rule, but passive, voiceless spectators in a civic life that was not of their making. They were means to external ends, resources to be regularly conscripted into the construction gangs that built the edifices which glorified the power of the king and which emphasised the fact of the people's slavery.

The origin of the city and of deified elite rule was also the origin of mechanisation and the machine mentality and culture. These early work gangs ordered by a supervisory personnel were complex machines. Although composed entirely of human parts, these gangs operated with the precision, discipline, and centralized coordination of machines. The machine mentality made the machine.

The effects of this machine mentality were felt in urban life in the form of a multiplication of order and discipline throughout the everyday life world. The city became a control centre, with the new division of labour making work a specialized and routinized chore.

[NEOLITHIC TO PALEOLITHIC – WAR AND VIOLENCE]

The primitive Neolithic community became more susceptible to anxiety-producing dangers and hardships as it expanded to form greater and greater external connections. The phenomenon of human sacrifice emerged in order to relieve the neurotic fears of the people. This was given a religious cloak in being justified as necessary to appease the gods. The sacrificial victims were often captives from other communities but were also drawn from the home community. All were victims of the new ideas of political rulership. From being a way of comprehending internal and external nature and the connection between the two, religion started its long career as the ideological support and rationalisation of political rule. The king would wage wars, set community against community, organise raids, and ensure a ready supply of captives to become victims for religious sacrifice. Behind the religious purpose lay organized campaigns to conquer or subdue other communities. War, conflict and rivalry naturally provoked fears of revenge attacks, further inflaming animosities, and generating a cult of warfare in every ancient city. In this grim logic of war or be warred upon, war without was joined with war within, the enemy without justifying leaders in suppressing people as the enemy within. Rulers waged war with each other to keep their own people down. Rulers employed war as a means by which popular hatred of the ruling class could be diverted into hatred of foreign enemies. At the same time, fear of foreign enemies was used to justify suppression of the people who were opposed to the ruling class. War bound the oppressed to their oppressors. Instead of coming together to fight the oppression of rulers, the people were directed in aggres­sive action against an external enemy. City fought city. Warfare became a way of life. Behind civilisation was not the citizen but the soldier, not the democrat but the king, not the philosopher but the priest.

The war and violence of the first cities is not to be explained by a biogically inherited belligerence. War is not even to be explained as an acquisitive demand for resources or land. War and violence do not derive from the innate aggression of human beings. Notions of biological inheritance beg the question of why this behaviour and not that at this time and place as distinct from others. War, conflict and violence have their origins in specific institutions and relations fashioned at particular times and places – the city, the power state. The destructive impulses of states and cities as power institutions threaten to erupt and wreck the very civilization that the city first nurtured and sustained. But since this destruction is not innate in some biological or anthropological sense, it is possible to recover life-enhancing and health-giving aspects of human life to check the aggressive tendencies of overscale cities and states as power machine complexes. The book draws upon biology, psychology, religion, mythology, the humanities and social sciences to steer a course to sanity, stability and security, marshaling the historical and cultural record to make the case for ecological regionalism and the green city.

[THE CITY AS A CIVILISING PLACE]

The city as the focal point or centre of civilisation. The city as civilising place. Social life and learning and morality as interactive, individuals as requiring other individuals in order to realise their social human essence. The possibilities of human life are realised in the drama of the city, with its human interaction and expense of energy. The physical form of the city—its architecture and urban plan—could either inhibit this civilising mission or it could enhance it to higher levels. This is the criticism of developments driven by money and power, creating a hollow physical form that is not within the comprehension and control of the city dwellers as citizens, discouraging human interaction and social intercourse by diminishing the genuinely public realm in favour of pandering to private interest, effectively privatising social space and sealing people off from one another in an air-conditioned, antiseptic form of glass, concrete, and steel. To stimulate effective human interaction that drives progress, cities had to be cut to human measure, scale and proportion, designed to encourage social and civic solidarity, exchange and reciprocity.

The creation of the built environment – second nature and all it comprises - is civilization itself. Which begs the question as to what civilization is. To adopt a dialectical biological approach it is the humanization of nature and the naturalisation of humanity in society.

The built environment contains records of a community's life and spirit. Every successive generation writes its own biography in the buildings it creates and in the cities it builds.

To identify the underlying spirit of a community's life there is a need to look beyond the written record to the shape and style of buildings and cities. This is not confined to the great buildings and master pieces of architecture, but embraces simple, commonplace structures—houses, barns, factories, bridges, post offices, even street-corner café’s—as expressions of the purposes and aspirations of a people. What is common is the building block of understanding - houses, shops, schools, factories, offices. By identifying the good and the bad, the interesting or dull, in the immediate environment, enhances our sensitivity to the great epics and dramas and symphonies in stone, the large views in concrete when they come to be analysed.

The process of urbanisation is conceived as a process of civilisation. The city concentrates and projects the power and culture of a civilization. The city preserves, embeds and transmits the morality of an age, its cultural heritage, its social purpose. The built environment and architectural design of a city - its physical layout, its domes and spires, its wide avenues and enclosed courts, its markets, courtyards, squares and neighbourhoods, tell the story of the various attempts of different peoples to fulfil their destiny as human beings. Yet whilst architecture, the built form and the art forms illuminate the record of urban development, these are physical manifestations of the human community that invests the city with a moral purpose. Social and aesthetic questions come together to determine whether the city is worthy of its inhabitants. Does the city enhance or inhibit human growth? Does the city correspond to or contradict the human ontology? How does the city order the relation of human nature within to external nature without? Is the city compatible with the human need to live well? Does its design foster human interaction and communication?

The book examines the dialectic of civilisation in the widest possible historical context: the various ways in which human nature and origins has been conceived, misconceived, actualised and incarnated through hard and soft culture, from machines to religion. To what extent is the notion of civilisation as progress a self-serving myth which, in identifying technological advance with human advance, masks the inversion of means and ends and the subordination of human beings to things, the turning of man into the machine. Science and technology equips the ruling class to gain and hold power, rationalising this power as progress.

Scientific and technological advance had been bought at the expense of moral regress and threatened ruination of the civilisation it had built. The modern association of power and productivity with mass murder, violence and destruction was not accidental but was more than the product of the particular politics of time and place. The imperatives are hard-wired in by long evolution. The rivalry of capitalism and communism turns out to be a dispute between

The problems of modernity lie in civilisation as such as an ambiguous process. The problems are deep seated and have sources which go back to the origins of the city. The problems of war, totalitarianism, conflict between and within nations, persecution, repression and genocide are not modern but are age old evils made bigger and more destructive by the progress of technological power. These are old evils made writ large by increasing technical and institutional capacity.

The study seeks the origins of human behaviour not in this or that set of social relations, but right back into the origins of society as such. It is to seek the origins of the problems in human nature, seeing how this nature is manifested in various ways through the progress of civilisation.

This goes back to prehistory, then the first civilisations, then ancient Greece. The book is a history of the city, a critique of civilisation, an evolution of human nature, a case for the preservation of life on earth.

The social and ecological devastation of the industrial age has not been overcome by the transition to hydroelectric power, scientific planning, ICT. The case for ecological regionalism and economic and political decentralization remains strong. But the irrational forces of modernization and mechanization are deep seated in human nature and its socio-spatial incarnation throughout history. Marx’s emphasis on the transformation of social relations, as distinct from changing the title deeds on private property, is a start that continually got overlooked as socialism came to be identified with state ownership and nationalisation. Why the socialist project so badly misfired time and again raises questions of personality and psychology, of authoritarianism and conformity, the fear of freedom that goes deep into the evolution of character. To understand these changes requires a return to the beginning, to the shadowy origins of human civilisation and the emergence of culture. Beginning with the emergence of signs and symbols, art and religion, one begins the journey of human self-knowledge. By understanding these origins better, we would gain a better understanding of where we now are.

[CULTURE]

The central set of insights of a richly textured interpretation of cultural evolution.

Civilisation as based on the interplay between reason, culture and nature. The human being is both symbol maker and interpreter, and culture is of transcendent importance in the evolution of human powers of comprehension and control. Culture establishes the main themes and outlines the "story" of any civilisation. Culture involves morality and religion, mythology and dream, taps into the unconscious and the arational to connect with intellect to form the spirit of the age—its dominating idea. It is this culture, not mere interest or prospect of gain, that motivates human beings to act. That which moves individuals to action in roles other than their natural functions within a social order is culture – morality, religion, ideals. To build with ideas is to build with the strongest material. Thus the active religion of any civilisation is not the worship of the gods, but the construction of the built world as a place of worship. Roman religion brought the Roman imperium. Human beings acted, struggled, lived and died for ideas such as these. The founder formulates and embodies this inspiring idea.

[The dialectic of civilisation.]

Technical progress is associated with the rise of a machine mentality and the transformation of human beings into a machine. The psychological and physi­ological consequences of this were debilitating to the human ontology in a general sense, not just with respect to sex as Freud thought. Weber regarded sex as nature’s last gasp, the last human activity to escape rationalisation. Freud underestimated just how deep seated the mechanisation of the human ontology was, just how far mechanisation had come to encroach upon and encompass human functions and expressions in general.

Alienation (Marx) and rationalisation (Weber) have deeper roots in evolutionary psychology and biology and in the attempts to incarnate the human ontology in a civilised order.

Civilisation emerges as an ambiguous process in that the expansion of technical powers is accompanied by rulership by elite religious and political power.

The first cities originated not as transmitters of culture or promoters of trade and intercourse. Elite rule, the power state, the deification of leaders, warriors and war were the drivers of the first state. If civilisation is identified with the emergence of the city, then the historical record also points to the emergence of political conflict and war at the same time.

The emergence of the city was associated with the dualism of rulers and ruled, elite and masses, with human sacrifice and blood shed, organized warfare and political conflict, religious bigotry, intolerance and conformity and mass passivity and anxiety and frustration.

right and left wings of the same thing.

Environmental studies, of town and regional plan­ning, and ecological thought.

[ORGANIC URBANISATION]

The formative role of the city in the process of cultural evolution. Urban development as human development – the progress of civilisation which is based upon an ecological and biological and anthropological sensitivity to organic relationships.

Communities as an outgrowth of the organic interaction between labour, first and second nature, city and place, and political and civic institutions. A human and political ecology must draw its theory from observation of human communities in their origin and evolution, just as Darwin, the speculative biologist, had founded his great explanatory idea upon exhaustive field study in the natural world.

[THE CITY

The city as the master theme. The city should be viewed from a high point – the tower as mountain, the conception of the ideal. The city should be studied "synoptically," as an interrelated whole. The synoptic approach affords a general view of the whole, manifesting and characterised by comprehensiveness and breadth of view. Vision. Aristotle understood that "large views in the abstract. . . depend upon large views in the concrete."

Understanding how the city ‘speaks’, learning to ‘read’ the city through its history, customs and habits, from its buildings, terrain, and inhabitants. To "read" a city is to examine its geography, architecture, and social relations and practices, understanding it through its historical emergence and current form.

The major problem of modern urban planning and regeneration is its abstraction from everyday life in cities. A rationalism which exalts means in the service of ends predetermined by financial and technological and bureaucratic parameters. A genuine reason lives in the city and operates through the city dwellers, and not in the academy and the office with ruler and parallels.

The holistic approach holds that a living organism can be understood only in terms of the total environment in which the particulars function.

The connection between city and country. The problems of the city can be effectively addressed only by setting the urban environment within its natural environs - a regional basis. The city is therefore a city region, a complex, interconnected ecosystem that one needs to grasp in its interdependencies I order to propose courses of action that correspond to rather than contradict the delicate natural balance. The approach requires familiarity with every aspect of the city region.

The holistic ecological regional approach requires a systematic survey of the whole metropolitan region, examining its historical origins, cultural heritage, social practices and environmental characteristics together. The diagnosis of the natural and human resources of a region is the foundation of effective urban planning.

The approach makes it possible to take the city in the large perspective of history and culture. Success depends upon the adoption of a historical, cultural and developmental approach which can establish connections within the present and between the present regional customs, ideas, and institutions and origins.

The evolutionist approach does not confine the regional survey to the spatial society of the present but starts from the present to move backwards through history to examine the human imprint – the enduring legacy of the past within existing current city forms and institutions. The integration of historical evolutionary perspective, specialized field research, and holistic "ecological" analysis produces effective informed plans for regional regeneration.

The city – its architecture, buildings, neighborhoods, museums, libraries, and art galleries – is in origin a sacred site and remains a city only in so far as its is the focal point of maximum concentration for the life and meaning of a community. It is in the city that the processes of civilization are engendered and concentrated.

[THE BIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO URBANISATION]

Biology – life and society as an ongoing interplay between organism and environment. The philosophical questions of freedom and determinism, nature and culture and reason, are not questions of an either/or dualism. There is no dualism within a holistic perspective that identifies the place and relations within the whole. Environment sometimes dominates the organism, as the mechanists argued, but at other moments the organism breaks the determinism and recreates the environment by cunning, energy, and skill. The result is a continuous process of dialectical interaction.

The exploration of cities through the mechanism of human cultural ascent as the parallel of Darwin’s examination of the mechanism of the biological descent of life on earth.

To integrate reason, culture and nature – to examine the city as a biological outgrowth. A sociobiological approach examines the city by identifying links and interrelationships, placing buildings and neighborhoods, roadways and bridges, within the environing ecological context of the city, setting the city within its surrounding region.

[BIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF URBAN PLANNING]

Organic urban planning is also an evolutionary planning. Nature has all the time in the world, wrote Charles Darwin. So too do human beings and their cities. In building new cities and in rebuilding old cities, the tyrants of architecture and bureaucrats of planning ignore the creative role played not just by people but by time itself. Cities are collective works of art, products of a centuries-long evolution by which a series of small changes build to a grand conclusion. A truly stimulating city, which impresses by its architecture and cultural variety, is the product not of a single genera­tion or a single architect or a single architectural conception. Beauty and diversity evolve, the achievement of human action and interaction in time, not the planner or designer.

Nevertheless, evolution needs a hand, a direction, a purpose - well thought-out social, biological, and aesthetic principles within plans that are flexible and open-ended to give freedom for human agency and time to effect future changes and improvements through adoption and adaptation. A detailed, preconceived image of the ideal city is manifested in a regimented, institutionalised, dull, lifeless form. The real city lives, adapting itself through a series of transitions from need to need, opportunity to opportunity, achieving coherence and purpose through change to generate a complex design that, whilst not conforming to preformed geometric pattern of designers and planners, achieves much greater precision and complexity in its richness and variety.

[CITY AND SOCIAL RELATIONS]

The city is not an autonomous entity independent of social relations.

Urban problems cannot be solved by focusing upon the city alone. The merit of ecological regionalism lies in the setting of the city within a wider social and environmental context. Urban regeneration needs to be coordinated with related programmes for energy conservation, pollution control, indus­trial decentralization, and local agricultural production. A shift in the distribution of resources from private to public and within public budgets from socially and environmentally destructive purposes – the military, nuclear power – to sustainable purposes. This in turn requires a complete transformation of the mode oflife. Social transformation is as moral and psychological as it is institutional; a change in social direction requires a change in morals and values. Institutional solutions alone will not work but will, at best, achieve contentless form.

[URBAN PRINCIPLES]

Urban principles – proportion in physical layout and civic design, compact civic centres and a vibrant neighborhood life. This is the village in the city, an ideal urban community that restores the city to its origins in the sacred and makes possible spiritual communion.

Urban virtues as the virtues of the good life in humane cities. Principles which make for a good city are cultural variety, liveliness, and handsome architectural form, sociability and community closeness, ensuring also privacy and open space. The rigid zoning of work, residences, and commercial areas is inimical to urban life. Each distinct district of the city should be a city in miniature. The city should be built to the terrain—designed with nature – and express architectural variety, liveliness, and human warmth. The city ought to be a constellation of medium-sized communities set in publicly protected open spaces given over to agriculture and recreation. The city form is set within an ecological regionalism, urbanism as living with nature in a reasonable habitat, of family life, and of self-discipline.

The built environment – the city, architecture – as "a home for man".

[REGIONALISM]

Regionalism – the creation of geographic city regions as the basis for a reinvirgorated public life - administrative, judicial, economic, and cultural life. A successful strategy of decentralization needs to be based upon geographic city regions, non-political groupings with respect to soil, climate, vegetation, animal life, industry and historic tradition, which succeed in recovering the classical sense of politics as public life, a politikon bion for zoon politikons.

Ecological regionalism requires a thorough reorganization of society around garden city nuclei. This is the principal task of the new politics.

[EVOLUTION OF CITIES]

The historic evolution of these cities draws on a wide range of subjects, biology, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, psychology, the humanities and social sciences, history and philosophy, political economy and ecology, geography, industry, transportation, infrastructure, parks and green spaces, neighborhood life, community organisation, planning and architecture, city governance, health and sanitary conditions, housing, and "the institutions for social betterment."

The approach is not neutral in an encyclopaedic sense but is oriented by the moral criterion that that historic growth should be examined on the basis of present day conditions from the perspective of the evolution and embodiment of essential life potentialities, and that the weight given to any particular growth is determined according to its importance in the affirmation of life. To create, sustain and improve cities, there is a need for a clear understanding of the soundest features of older cities.

The morphology and physiology of cities, the origins and evolution of urbanisation as civilisation, the emergence of the politics of rulers and ruled, increasing abstraction of power and differentiation of social life.

[POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY – CITY AND STATE]

Political philosophy as an overarching reason that needs to be relocated in the human forms prior to the state. Political philosophy originated in ancient Greece and was polis oriented. The prescriptions of Plato and Aristotle pertained to the city-state, polities scaled to human dimensions, not to the state as such.

[CITIES AS PUBLIC COMMUNITY]

Cities need to be composed of communities – the Aristotelian notion of the community of communities – built to nature's contours and scaled to human needs, living examples of organic planning. The union of universal and particular – the city-state as the community of communities.

[EVOLUTION OF MIND]

The grand theme of the whole research is to describe the emergence and evolution of the human mind in and through socio-spatial development. The creation of a second nature out of a first nature and the resultant interplay of nature, culture and reason. The rationale is to find the ideal balance between the rational and emotional sides of human beings, achieving a unity of spiritual and material concerns which the one sided mechanistic age of science and technology oriented rationalism has occluded.

[CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION]

Real transformation is a cultural process that takes place amongst the people, nit their leaders and representatives. The nation state is an organisation of abstracted power, an artificial institutional creation that functions in independence of people and place. Cultural transformation proceeds within the geographic region, an area possessing a common climate, natural environment, and culture. Regeneration proceeds from the small to the large, local to the global. Avoid ‘global’ crusades which must necessarily be or become abstract – proceeding through abstracted institutions – and proceed from the region and locale to establish the foundation for the renewal of life.

[EVOLUTION – MASTER THEME]

The study of biology, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, psychology, the humanities and social sciences, history and philosophy, political economy and ecology, geography, is integrated by a moral theme concerning the evolution, growth and development of life on earth. The specialists and practitioners in each field – particular those who have become prisoners of the organisation and the academy – need to know that their work and actions have moral as well as social and aesthetic implications and consequences. They are charged with the responsibility to help create "the good life" for all citizens, not just for a privileged few.

[SYMBOLS]

The holistic ecological approach to the study of human communities. Richly informed and imaginative accounts of the progress of urban civilization infusing details with ideas, identifying a purpose – moral ? – at work in the unfolding. To build with ideas is to recognise that the human species is homo symbolicus as well as homo faber. This should have been clear in the designation homo sapiens – rational man. It is on this rational capacity that the foundations of the great historic cities were laid and which project a design for the city of tomorrow.

[SYMBOLS AND EVOLUTION]

This theory of evolution from early origins underscores the importance of human beings as being, in the first instance, symbol making animals. Mythology, psychology and religion, dream and language. The human being is a symbol-creating, ritual enacting, god-seeking animal, an artist, a visionary and a dreamer whose search for meaning within and without leads to the reshaping and reconfiguring of nature within and without, creating a second nature different from original nature and a personality different original biological self. The emergence of man as homo faber, a tool making animal, was not prior to this search for meaning. The human being created an image of himself and his world before he set about making the tools which would enable him to remake the world in his own image. Man made – and continues to remake – the world in his own image.

The human being is not primarily homo faber—a toolmaking animal. The species is known as homo sapiens – rational man. Language—speech, story-telling, communication—is the greatest human achievement of all, making all other products possible. The principal symbol-making activities of human beings are language, mathematics and music, making it possible to establish connections within the world of nature, its patterns and rhythms and regularities, as well as between human beings in society as it evolves. Speech, vision, dream, story and communication have infinitely enlarged the domain of human potentialities beyond the immediately given, enabling human beings to fashion a unique culture beyond the constraints of original biological nature. These symbolic activities take in philosophy, mathematics, religion, music, art, poetry and established the visionary ethical and rational context for the subsequent technical mastery of the natural environment through tools, weapons and institutions.

For much of human evolution, the symbol-making and tool-making aspects of human nature have been in relative balance, so much so that one could speak of human beings as rational animals in both moral and technical senses. The waning of the Middle Ages, however, was the start of the process by which the technical capacities of human beings came to outstrip the moral capacities. With scientific advance, followed by industrial revolution, human beings first surrendered to the machine and then became a prisoner of the machine. Human society came to be characterised by an overdeveloped technology alongside underdeveloped personality, as hard culture took precedence over psychology, the emotional side of human beings. The objective factor came to dominate the subjective factor. To right the balance between subjective and objective factors in their development, there is a need not primary for structural transformation but for a new vision, a new mentality and psychology that ensures that the restructuring of reality does revalue the subjective factor. There is a need to recover art alongside technics. Orpheus, the player of the lyre, in tune with the rhythm of life, must take his place alongside Prometheus, whose theft of fire from the gods symbolises the price to be paid for technical development without ethical constraint and direction. Human beings become human not through technical development but less than human in making tools and remaking the world in the image of tools. Human beings become appendages of their machines, mere means to technical ends. The Promethean myth holds that the precondition of human development is the making of fire the servant of humanity. The fact that the fire has to be stolen from the gods indicates the impiety involved, the breaking of sacred, ethical codes which are essential to ensure balanced development. The Prometheans discover that as development proceeds, means and ends come to be inverted, means are enlarged to become ends in themselves, human beings, the true ends, become the servants of technics. Human beings cease to be human as they become mere means to impersonal ends. This pathos of means and ends did not originate in the critical sociology of Marx and Weber but was expressed in the Promethean myth from ancient Greece. The lesson shows that Marx and Weber did not dig deeply enough into this pathos. Marx felt that the transformation of social relations would restore the unity of subjective and objective factors, enabling a repersonalisation on a higher level of development. Weber felt the iron cage of modernity to be irredeemable. The point is that modernity as such needs to be set in the broad historical sweep of evolution in which technics, tools, machines, came to occupy the determining sway in human life. Human beings become human not by making fire the servant of human ends. Marx’s call to abolish alienation, creative praxis as the reappropriation by labour and society of powers alienated to the state and capital, amounts to a demand that fire be recovered as the servant of the Promethean ends of humanity. Which begs the question as to why the means became the end in the first place. In arguing for the transformation of social relations, Marx had a large part of the solution. But he missed out the crucial moral, mental and psychological part, the part which ensures balanced development. Human beings become human not through the control of their technical powers as such but through the ethical, intellectual, visionary and even religious appreciation of these powers. Through their symbol creating faculty, human beings are able to communicate, translate ideals into real, express fellowship and love, enrich immediate life with dreams and visions, invest the objective world with meaning, articulate psychological impulses connecting past, present and future, make a home of the world. The human potential, therefore, resides within and without and in the mediation between.

[SYMBOLS AND TOOLS, REASON AND PLAY]

Anthropological and archaeological work emphasizes the part played by inventions like the plow and the military chariot in the emergence of civilization and the first cities. This demonstrates too heavy an emphasis upon the physical record, the record which is likeliest to have survived. The legacy of the mind is more difficult to discern given that it cannot be held or physically seen. The inventions of the mind - mathe­matics and astronomical observation, writing and the written record, mythology and story-telling and the religious idea of a universal order derived from observation of the heavens – are at least as important.

Integrating the various disciplines is an organizing concept: civilisation is the development of the mind. Language and ritual – symbols – play a more important role in human evolution than the introduction and utilization of the first primitive tools. ‘Minding’ and "making", thinking and doing join together to define the reason of the species homo sapiens in its balanced sense. If the purpose of the city is not merely to live but to live well, there is a need to affirm reason in this larger sense. This is to orient human evolution beyond physical survival to cultural and mental development. Culture and intellect have the capacity to overcome passive subjection to technological domination and to determine the direction of technology in a balanced and humane manner.

Affirming the primacy of the mind, evolution from human origins is to be traced in terms of soft as well as hard culture.

[SYMBOLS AND TOOLS, REASON AND PLAY– PRIMACY OF CULTURE]

The central point is not that scientific and technological advance has been perverted but that human nature is predisposed toward autonomy, making it possible to overthrow the contemporary enslavement to technology in all its forms. Behind the modern age’s total subordination of man to the machine is the image of homo faber, of human beings as primarily toolmaking animals. This is another plausible myth, so plausible that it has taken in critics of the industrial system like Thomas Carlyle to Karl Marx to Thorstein Veblen. In overvaluing the role of tools and weapons in justifying man the maker, such theorists had devalued the role of man the thinker. Not only did such thinkers distort the character and course of human evolution, in undermining the mental and cultural capacities required to challenge the modern machine age, they were the unwitting apologists of this machine age. Communism was undoubtedly a distortion of Marx’s views, but it also revealed the extent to which Marx premised progress on the expansion of the industrial system.

All these attempts to characterise human nature suffer from one-sidedness. Whether one refers to language and symbols, tools, reason, they take the particular for the whole. Since the nineteenth century, the time when the economic factor started to predominate in human affairs, there has been reference to homo economicus. There are other, even more essential, aspects which are apt to be overlooked. The book The Mating Mind marshals an impressive body of evidence to show how the whole of human culture – language, art, music etc – has evolved under a sexual imperative, the need for males to attract females. The female body has also evolved to be a sexual signalling system from head to toe. To all the other designations one must also add homo eroticus, human beings are the most sexual beings of all.

A related characteristic is play. Play and sex are related by the expressive use of the whole body. If the human being is anything essentially then he is a dancing, acting, mimicking, ritual-making animal. Huizinga's Homo Ludens makes it clear that play rather than work makes human beings human. As much as tool making, this playful and sexual aspect of human being has shaped the character of human development, pertaining to dreams and fantasies, his magic, rituals, totems, and taboos. Since prehistory, human beings have been dream-chasing, dream-haunted animals, and the richness of these fantasies has enabled the transcendence of an existence driven by basic biological drives. The dream and the sexual drive powered human development and were simultaneously expressed and repressed in mythology and religion, analysed by psychology and biology, regulated in politics. How these issues are canalised determines the extent to which these energies are forces for creation or for destruction.

The first humans were dreaming animals, these dreams being a mixture of fantasies and fears. The evolution of art forms, symbols, signs and ciphers, was driven by the need to confront the source of the disturbance. The large, hyperactive human brain and the oversexed human appetite identifies the human predicament as a continuous and never-ending struggle between rational and irrational forces. Moralists have ever sought to place reason in control, identifying the sovereignty of reason with freedom. The conscious mind will, however, always be vulnerable to unconscious urges, desires and promptings, some creative and ecstatic, others destructive and suicidal. Scientific and technological advance could only be said to be truly rational if human beings take full and true measure of the unconscious. The unconscious is religious, psychological and sexual, involving plenty that is hard to reconcile at a rational level. The demons of the psyche become destructive only when ignored or denied. In identifying psyche with soul and marrying this aspect with eros, ritual was crucially important. The performance of ritual—the constant repeating of movements and gestures in the company of others—laid down a pattern of order eventually carried over into language and other expressions of human culture. Ritual guards human beings from insanity.

Belief creates meaning and ritual gives it permanence and order. This permits a degree of control over nature and gives a creative outlet to irrational promptings. Ritual goes hand in hand with the development of language. This ability to symbolize represents the greatest human achievement, the basis and substance of human behaviour. More than scientific and technological advance, advances in language and the symbolic arts lay behind every advance in human culture, including toolmaking.

Above and beyond the making of fire, tools and weapons, was the slow evolution of the cultural heritage through language, ritual, religion, art and social organization. From the time of the caves, the overdeveloped brain gave human beings an all-purpose tool with which to humanize the world. This excess mental energy was a capacity for self-transcen­dence, driving cultural evolution beyond the given, and ensuring that the future is always available to be created. The machine system is a product of the mind. It lasts only so long as people believe it to be true.

The problem is that the human creator and controller is both a highly rational and profoundly irrational being. These aspects co-exist in human nature and in the society of human beings. Before Freud Robert Louis Stevenson had shown that all human beings were a Jekyll and Hyde character. Freud, the founder of psychology, saw the soul as the sphere of an eternal conflict between two forces, Eros as construc­tive and life-enhancing, Thanatos as destructive and life-denying. The need to reconcile these ambivalent traits constitutes the supreme human problem. The struggle between the two is the human condition. The familiar lament that technological development has outstripped moral development understates the true scale of the human predicament. Human beings can control the technical powers only if they succeed in understanding the dreams and drives and impulses of the unconscious, confronting these urges and understanding whether they really are demons or have been misconceived as such through ignorance. To take a proper measure of the outer world, human beings need to be in possession of the inner world. An historical understanding of human self-creation is also a form of self-knowledge, drawing out the deeper sources of humankind's rational and irrational acts.

[Jung and the unconscious.]

For Jung, the unconscious was not just the "hiding place of the demons but the province of angels and ministers of grace." These Jungian archetypes are forces of health, unity, and ethical direction, ideas and social practices which have been millennia in the making. Clear and agreed-upon values, recognizable faces and landmarks, steady vocational duties emerge as points of support which allow people to keep a balanced and sane hold upon life. These are being subverted by the growth-mania of the modern age.

These values are not to be dismissed as outdated. They have evolved through a series of adaptations over millennia and are therefore values forged by the wealth of human experience. The past is never outdated but lives on in the present in the form of autonomous functions, orderly processes, and stabilizing associations. These are human values which the machine system attempts to uproot and detach people from, leaving them no alternative but to surrender to the machine.

[RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY]

The analysis uses mythology, religion and psychology to reach into the dark inner recesses of the uncon­scious, bringing to light the disturbances and repressions which, if uncorrected, will bring the ruination of the city and civilization. The understanding of these drives and compulsions will allow their effective canalising into positive forms, turning negatives into positives through balanced growth. To return to human origins is justified as a psychological process by which an infantile trauma blocking healthy growth and integration needs to be exposed. Diagnosis is discovery leading to health and happiness.

[PSYCHE AND SOUL]

The world of social, institutional and geopolitical turmoil – war without and within – is subject to a crisis that is essentially spiritual in nature, "a schism of the soul," as Toynbee called it. One can examine here the modern process of desacrilisation. One can also pursue the psychological aspect in recognition of the connection of the word psyche with the Greek for soul. Freud’s modern breakthroughs make possible the recovery of an ancient wisdom. The search for recovery and stability requires that the past be confronted, unburied before being put to rest.

[HUMAN NATURE AS REVEALED BY BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY, MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION]

Human nature. The lessons of biology and psychology. The revaluation of religious notions of ‘fallen’ nature and utopian notions of perfectability. Perfectability as a technocratic vision of man as machine. The need to be informed by evolutionary biology and psychology. Evolution as a continuous process of transformation and adaptation, rendering any notion of a final or complete resolution of social problems impossible. The inescapable tragedy of the human condition requiring the religious impulse, the means by which the human unconsciousness orders and steadies the human consciousness.

The human nature argument, the ‘fallen’ state of human beings as denying the essential goodness of human beings. To believe in essential goodness is to hold out some prospect of perfectability, since human problems can be attributed to socio-institutional pathologies rather than human nature. The ‘fallen’ argument needs to be compared and contrasted with the findings of evolutionary biology and psychology. Richard Dawkins supports the creation of a liberal, democratic and cooperative social order but warns that its advocates can receive no help from biological nature. The view implies that there will always be a worm in the apple as a result of flawed human nature. Human nature is crooked and therefore can not and can never create a social order that is entirely straight. The question then is what socio-institutional context is required to ensure that the desirable elements of human nature are allowed to flourish and the undesirable checked or redirected. Whether one calls it evil or irrationality or the Id, this aspect is ineradicable and the point of social engineering is to canalise positive and negative energies accordingly.

[SCIENCE AND RELIGION AND POWER]

The emergence of deified rulers was accompanied by the scientific attempt to reveal an absolute cosmic regularity in nature. The king's astronomer-priests identified the supernatural order of the heavens with the human order, investing the ruler with godlike attributes to increase his politi­cal authority. The deification of the ruler was also the deification of the power state.

The political absolutism of the state has its origins in the appropriation of religion and the gods from the people. The sky gods, particularly Ra, the sun god, became preeminent. Modern science is another form of star and sky gazing and is also connected with political absolutism. As late as the seventeenth century, Louis XIV was calling himself ‘The Sun King’.

The state as a power machine requires two things - scientific knowledge and an elaborate bureaucracy for the effective execution of orders. In both systems, knowledge is not only power, it is secret. The priestly monopoly knowledge is central to the system of total control.

In the ancient city, the king was served by a loyal corps of scribes, messengers, stewards, superintendents, and gang bosses. A primitive, emergent bureaucracy, transmitting the word of the king, they formed the neural and nervous system of the power complex, organising scattered populations and putting them to work on an unprecedented scale. With the priests and the army, this corps formed a complex of interlocking power presided over by the king.

This power machine complex forms the archetype for all later complexes of mechanical organization. The main difference is that, in time, there was a greater substitution of human parts for physical parts, although the mechanisation of the human character continued apace.

The machine age, then, was not ushered in by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, nor by the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mechanisation began at least at the start of recorded history, in the creation and utilisation of mass labour complexes, machines composed of human beings. Workers as machines endured forced labour and were induced to suffer mind-dulling, repetitive tasks to the greater power, glory, and material well-being of a small deified ruling elite. This efficient utilisation of labour prefigured the crucial aspects of mod­ern industrial production: the interchangeability of parts, the external direction of work, the centralization of scientific and technical knowledge, and the regimentation of labour.

[The revolt of the axial religions.]

A modern mythology. Human beings as symbol-making animals. The need – and the capacity – to rewrite the story of civilisation from within. The machine system seduces as much as it threatens – claiming a beneficient purpose so long as one conforms, the parts fit in. This mythology holds both the controllers and the controlled in its thrall. Both serve the machine. But the primacy of the mind, the minding capacity of human beings, emphasises the role of culture, ideas, ideals. Religion in the form of justifying the deified king sustained the first power complex. This complex collapsed when the polarizing force of kingship was undermined. The revolt against kingly authority followed, some time between 900 and 600 B.C., with the likes of Amos, Hesiod, and Lao-tzu deriding the cult of power and advocating values antithetical to the vast images, intimidating buildings and architecture, excess consumption, promiscuous sexuality, warfare and human sacrifices of the power system. These teachers preached withdrawal, fasting, and meditation, the values of the simple life. These values would also later be affirmed by prophets like Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, dissolving the magico-religious illusion of the power megamachine. The point is that just as the machine state and system rested upon human belief rather than physical force alone, so, with the withdrawal of belief, it fell through its own internal hollowness.

[INNER CONVERSION]

An agenda for social transformation connects outer change with an inner conversion so that the coming revolution is as moral and psychological as it is political.

[BELIEF AND MEANING]

Rome fell not from without through barbarian invasions but from within. This internal collapse was more than political or economic ineptitude. The Empire had seen ineptitude aplenty. Rome collapsed through a falling away of faith and meaning amongst its inhabitants, people who had long since ceased to view themselves as or act as citizen of a public sphere. Civilizations require a meaningful organizing idea or principle which, though never precisely stated, commands respect and is continually at work in every important activity and institution. The idea is at first incarnated in a single person, a Jesus, a Buddha, a Confucius, and then takes hold in many persons and takes institutionalised and organised form. Religions thus come to establish a new pattern of living, a new way of organizing the world. When this original idea comes to be distorted or perverted, when those who claim to live by its principles fail so do to —as the church first departed from the simplicity of Jesus Christ and then had failed to take St. Francis of Assisi's advice to return —then the idea starts to shed adherents and is gradually challenged or replaced by other ideas.

[REASON AND MYTH]

Reason as pure intellect can never be in control and it would be dangerous to life if it would ever attain such control. Pure intellect in control is akin to the absolute ruler. In psychological terms, by repressing the Id to rigorously, the Superego risks a destructive reaction. Rather than sublimating unreason, a civilisation which is based upon an excessive rule of reason produces an upsurge of barbarism. The animal energies of the Id cannot be so easily repressed and, when unleashed through too regimented and regularised an approach to life, join with the powerful technical and social forces of rational civilization to plunge the world into barbarism.

Mythology is to civilisation what the unconscious is to the conscious mind. Just as psychology and biology can inform us of deep seated drives and impulses beyond the easy control of reason, so mythology and religion can inform us of everyday and ineliminable elements of civilisation that are prone to be overlooked or dismissed by reason. Reason cannot rule alone, only in alliance with the range of life energies and forces. Vico distinguishes two ways of seeing the world—the imaginative universal and the intelligible universal. The intelligible universal is a narrow mode of understanding, an object-oriented epistemology in which reality is apprehended by the intellect; the imaginative universal is a holistic mode of understanding that is focused on the sensations. The intelligible universal values logic, reason, and precise measurement and calculation and employs coldly precise, denatured language; the imaginative universal values myth, poetry, dance, song, cere­mony, and magic and employs metaphoric language. The progress of civilisation through scientific advance has evinced a movement from the imaginative to the intelligible universal. The result has been great material riches but at the expense of the "disease of abstraction," an exclusive concentration upon reason and intelligence as guides to life experience. This has done untold damage to life and ensures that reason frequently turns into and is expressed as its opposite.

[EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION – CLASS AND ESSENCE]

Society is to be analysed from a class perspective, as a structure organized on the basis of productive relations and economic interests. Such a perspective can be informed by considering society as a biological organism whose functional health is conditional upon the smooth cooperation and unity of purpose of its component parts. The two approaches are compatible, Marx combining class analysis with Aristotelian essentialism. Internal harmony, balance, and functional cooperation are the prerequisites of bodily health which are also crucial to community health. The ideal is inner and outer harmony within and between person, place and environs. A common purpose unites all in the formulation and pursuit of universally agreed-upon values which is that age’s conception of the good life.

The organic interpretation traces the course of urban technological changes throughout civilisation, identifying the dynamics and causal factors at work. Part of this explanation is class and power struggles. Change does not just evolve. Things happens because certain groups and classes act to bring it about. The evolutionary perspective leads naturally to an emphasis on gradual assimilation and integration as against discontinuities induced by class or mass action. Large changes in the long run seem the product of a bland evolution in which human action and struggle is absent.

[POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY]

Democracy as empowerment – community architecture is a socially responsible architecture.

[VIRTUE ETHIC]

Humankind’s hope is social and self knowledge, control, determination, and transcendence as against abstract, instrumental wealth and power. The ‘good life’ values life as the true wealth.

Virtue theory – the classical sources. Virtue is its own reward.

Plato and Aristotle. The Cynics.

The good life is a life of balanced social and self-development – a simplicity of things and an abundance of life.

[ANCIENT GREECE]

The ancient Greeks – the ideal of a community that is balanced, sane, continent, athletic, living a clear-eyed life within bounds, recognising that fulfilment requires limits.

The politics and thought of classical Greece emphasized the importance to the city of geography and climate—of the air, the sea, and the soil—of human habits and institutions, culture and education.

The need to place limits on physical growth to ensure not just environmental health – sustainability – but human growth.

Themes - an environmental awareness.

[ANCIENT GREECE]

The ancient polis as a form of civic life.

The ancient polis arose in the Aegean area between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. as the result of the devolution of power from the citadel to the democratic, village-based community. The ancient Greeks distrusted kingly power and centralized rule. Rather than support the cosmic or deified king, the Greeks demythologized their leaders and made rule dependent upon popular support and a common constitution. The Greeks also gave their gods human characters, so that they expressed the same amorous drives and jealous rival­ries as the people who worshipped them. This healthy and sane attitude prevented the emergence of abstract power, the deification of power and rule divorced from the people.

The key city-state of this civilisation was Athens. Athens was not magnificent in terms of its architecture and building. Its magnificence lay in its social relations and character of its people. Athens valued citizens as gifted amateurs contemptuous of specialists and pettifogging administrators.

The Athenian achievement is concentrated in the polis, and was daily confirmd in the agora, or common meeting ground, a market place which concerned not the exchange of material goods but of ideas. This character of the polis derived from Aegean village culture as depicted by Hesiod in his Works and Days. The mountain villages of the western Aegean practiced a rudimentary communism which valued the simple material life as enabling a rich, many-sided human life. The little surplus of material goods made for a surplus of time which the Greeks used for philosophical speculation, discourse, aesthetic pleasure and sexual passion.

The fall of Athens stems from its failure to respect its own urban principles of appropriate scale, limits, and human proportion. The polis became a metropolis - an overcrowded, materially wealthy centre increasingly obsessed by gain within an extensive and burgeoning trade and colonial empire. The demise of Athens confirmed the truth of its original urban principles as against the aggressive mode of the earliest king-centered power cities.

[ROME]

The Roman city.

As city-building specialists, the Romans have a special place in the evolution of urban civilisation. The Roman cities exhibit formal composure and dignity and are characterised by geometric precision and uniformity. They are the architectural counterparts of the Roman military machine.

Of course, the Romans also built hundreds of new towns which were simple in layout and were scaled to human dimensions. However, in the transition from Republic to Empire, Rome became a culture of excess and spectacle rather than sufficiency and substance—loud, dirty, vulgar, overbuilt, and morally and spiritually rotten, a city where all was for show or sale.

[MECHANISATION]

The driving principle of technological advance for some 5,000 years has been the desire to transform nature and human nature into a machine, an exploitable resource for the expansion of power and control. The rise of the city and civilisation has been accompanied by the growing domination of public life by centralized organizations that are driven to continuously expand power in order to achieve control over both human communities and the natural environment.

Against the large political-military power states are the small systems based principally on human skill and animal energy. These have less concentrated power but are more efficient and sustainable in their use of resources. The modern nation state is a modern incarnation of the original kingly-warrior models, their aggressive character magnified by technique. The difference is that whereas in the old system it was the absolute ruler, a person, who was the centre of authority, in the modern state the system itself commands authority.

The rise and triumph of mechanicism has involved a debasement of morals, imagination, self-determination, creativity and spontaneous living. The rationalisation of means has been accompanied by an irrationalism in terms of human ends.

The mechanisation of life was as much a mental as a technical process, requiring a process of psychical and ideological preparation. There is a tendency to date the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, with the introduction of the steam engine and the application of machine power to the production of textiles. A study of the history of technology, however, locates the origins of the industrial machine age in the Middle Ages.

In general terms, one can trace the growing mechanisation of life in human evolution as a whole, starting from ancient civilisation. This approach shows how a series of cultural transformations continually prepare the ground and the mentality for the greater technical revolution to follow. Before the machine emerges, human beings have become mechanical in thought and deed. The new machines express the new mentality and character.

[TECHNOLOGY]

Approach to technology. Critical. Technology needs to be restored to its true function as a means to human end, not an end forced by imperatives. Techbology needs to be set within the ideals of balance, form and unity. These ideals constitute the city as a community scaled to human proportion and dimension, supplying social variety and preserving social cohesion, unity of form and human scale in neighborhoods and in architecture.

Weber and rationalisation.

[STAGES OF EVOLUTION]

Historical evolution – technology and the use and conversion of energy – inputs and outpus.

The stages of the modern machine age are determined by the particular mode of technology and energy.

1 the eotechnic - the critical period of preparation in which all the machines crucial to universalize technology were invented.

The eotechnic era extends from the Middle Ages to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. The period is falsely conceived to be technologically backward whereas, in fact, it is characterised by a series of inventions and discoveries which were crucial in preparing the ground for the industrial and scientific revolutions. The 17C Age of Reason and the 18C age of industrial and political revolution have their origins here. The major inventions are the mechanical clock, the telescope, the printing press, the magnetic compass, and the blast furnace.

The eotechnic era was one which balanced culture and technology, constraining power within ethical bounds, combining rich cultural diversity with technological advance within an ethical order. Perhaps for the last time, reason and passion, knowledge and emotion were combined. Religion could coexist with science. Science had conscience, each recognised the claims of the other in the balancing of the spheres. Achievements in the mechanical and practical arts were thus combined with a cultivation of the sensual and the spiritual, with magic, myth, and ceremony. The standard of value by which the social order was oriented was not the overriding imperatives of money and power, commercial and bureaucratic expansion, but a balanced enhancement of life in sight and sound and psychical harmony - images, music, play, sexual ecstasy. Huizinga. Balanced growth made a rounded culture possible. The late Middle Ages evinced a sane and sober unity of means and ends, with technology being employed in the service of life and its enhancement in all its aspects, material, sensual and sacred, building cities and cathedrals that were both works of art and utility.

2 the paleotechnic - the age of coal and steam.

The balanced civilization of the eotechnic era created the seeds of its own dissolution into the paleotechnic era. The paleotechnic era was an age dominated by science, technology, and capitalism, the origins of which lay in the eotechic era. The advances in science and technology made in the eotechnic era unbalanced development and differentiated progress from its social and ethical moorings. The paleotechnic era transformed scientific and technological advance into a deliberate and conscious determination to subordinate the whole of human experience to the direction of science and technology. Divorced from the sensual and sacred aspects of social life, development became unbalanced, sweeping everyone up within external imperatives. This process of cultural debasement was confirmed by the rise of capitalism, with all material values coming to be subordinated to profit and productivity. Science, technology and economics inverted the true relation between means and ends, divorcing power from a sense of the sacred, the ethical and th humane, exalting power as the abstraction, measurement, quantification and commodification of all things as exploitable resources – people, places and things.

Civilisation lost its sense of the sacred and its sense of limits. Endless expansion was its overriding imperative to which all were subject. There could be no end to the process given that the purpose of production was the self-expansion of values, accumulation for the sake of further accumulation. Such a process is essentially without limit and without end. The capitalist could never be too rich, but must continue to expand his wealth or be appropriated. The same reasoning applied in other spheres. The state could not possess too much territory, but must acquire and/or control more or fall under the power of another state. The city could not become too big, but must continue to expand to compete with rivals. Progress ceased to have a human dimension, measured in terms of the realisation and exercise of the virtues, but came to be quantified in terms of the amount of goods produced. Whereas work was once considered to be merely a necessary part of a rich conception of living, it now became a necessary and all-consuming means to survival within a growth economy.

3 the neotechnic - clean-burning electricity and new metals, such as aluminum and steel.

This Faustian exchange of the soul for technological and material progress, however, was not the end of the story of civilisation. Civilisation, discontent and madness go hand in hand in a phase of unbalanced growth. The solution lies in identifying possibilities for alternate futurity in contemporary lines of development. There is no nostalgic return to a lost golden age.

There is a need to reorient science and technology in the service of community, cooperation, communication and self-determination. Advances in architecture, engineering, city building, transportation, industry, and science should be examined for their potential to engender the ecological regional neo­technic civilization. Modernity has the skill and knowledge to create a new world of humane values. The continued domination of outdated paleotechnic imperatives and habits and mentalities serves to frustrate the full realisation of this technical potential for human enrichment.18

[MEDIEVAL AGE]

Revaluation of medieval communes and city-states

The roots of ecological regionalism in the medieval economy of free cities, with their powerful guilds and semiautonomous corporate bodies.

The medieval town is analysed for evidence of a balanced urban development scaled to human need and proportion - compactly designed, limited in size, and surrounded by open countryside.

Urbanisation evinces an inability to keep means and ends in proper relation, with means replacing ends, causing a long descent into moral confusion and ecological disharmony. Balance involves the creation of cities closely tailored to human needs. The emergence of such cities evincing harmony in the parts requires the ability to conceive mentally and morally a new image of the city.

[The medieval city]

Limit, self-control and sufficiency values for survival, reorienting civilisation back from the brink of excess.

The medieval city bears many of the characteristics of the organic community. They were ground-hugging cities which were fitted to the irregular con­tours of the land. Built to human scale, they retained a sense of the divine with their occasional lofty spires and towers. Cities were held to pedestrian scale, with all buildings within walking distance. With ample green space without and within, the medieval city provided public spaces for common worship, spectacle, meeting, trading, trafficking and politicking. The city walls defined clear outer boundaries and ensured a tight urban form. The medieval city was also a visual delight through the balance of the horizontal and the vertical, the way that the bounding wall and low-slung houses were set against the soaring cathedral towers.

The main market was part amphitheater, part acropolis, as much a place for common worship and common celebration as for trading, located near to the church or cathedral, the place where processions and plays. Townspeople were thus able to come together to engage in civic discourse and intercourse as active participants. As a focal point of human interaction, the market as public place was connected with the various quarters of the city through footways, narrow, twisting corridors that visually offset the amplitude of the wide public squares, protecting fronts from the wind and the rain. Freestanding houses, wasteful of land and exposed to the elements, were few.

Tightness of design encouraged associational life and a busy, gossipy street life. At the same time, the medieval city offered spaces for seclusion and retreat, allowing possibilities for sanctuary and solitude, in the form of hidden gardens, cloisters, and interior courtyards. At the same time as houses and buildings are to be opened to sunlight and the outdoors, there is a need to recognise the need peace and quiet, withdrawal and privacy.

The enduring lesson of the medieval city concerns the restraint on physical growth. Medieval towns and cities were kept within a mile from its centre. Up to the fourteenth century, excess population was catered for through the creation of new cities, spaced at a half a day's walk from each other. Walls here performed a function in setting limits, keeping the medieval city within limits. The medieval city did not exceed limits by being constrained within its walls. The walls prevented the city from extending over the countryside. The open countryside lay just beyond the walls to give the cities a green belt. The cities possessed a rural character. Even the greatest cities, like fourteenth-century London, had populations of no more than 40,000. Close to the open countryside, a rural flavour was introduced into the city through numerous rear gardens and orchards, and in the various fresh foods on display in the public markets.

The spiritual and secular concerns of the city were expressed in its physical layout. The inner unity of tradition was manifested in the outer unity of structure. The unity and order of the medieval city was represented in the church and the guild, the pillars of public life in the city. Organised around the pursuit of virtue or salvation, the medieval city created a universal bond which recognised that individuals in communities need to share certain common values in order to invest life with meaning and purpose. In religious terms, the city affirmed each age’s concern with the good life.

The corporate and communal character of medieval city life offered a communitarian modus vivendi which contrasts with the atomism and egoism of bourgeois materialism. The identity of an individual depended upon membership of an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild. There was no identity and no security available to the individual except in association with others. Freedom was based upon a reciprocity that recognised the obligations to others within corporate life. With impulses curtailed by moral and functional purposes laid down by church and guild, these towns fulfilled Aristotle's demand that a community represent ‘the common interest in justice and the common aim, that of the good life.’

[THE IMPERIAL CITY]

The imperial city of the seventeenth century is a city of discipline, order, and class privilege. This was an age of scientific advance, a something which came to be reflected in urban form in the shape of a concern for mathematical precision and order. The imperial city is therefore characterised by rigorous street plans, formal city layouts, and geometrically ordered landscape designs. This orderliness and precision also came to be manifested in painting, sculpture, costume, sexual life, and statecraft, of emotion, passion, and irregularity. The age from the Renaissance to the Age of Reason evinces a shift from a concern with universality to a concern with uniformity, from localism and particularism to centralization, from the absolute power of God to the absolute power of the nation-state and its sovereign.

The modern nation state emerged in the imperial age as powerful kings and their ministers began to remove local autonomy and centralize authority. This centralisation of authority in the capital city created permanent bureaucracy, courts of justice, treasury, and standing army. By destroying the power and autonomy of the localities, formerly urban centres began to stagnate and die, undermining centuries’ old patterns of urban public life. The values and powers of the princes were reflected in the design of the imperial city. Symbolic of the new urban order was the way that the avenue, long, straight, and wide, cut through the old medieval courts and triangles. The avenue represented the militarization of life and of space in being designed to move wheeled traffic and military troops. Urban space became a grand parade ground, with people ceasing to be citizens and instead becoming spectators as the armies of the despot were put on constant display. The spectacle was intended to awe and intimidate the urban population, constant reminders that they were no longer citizens of a public realm. The late imperial period is characterised by a symmetrical building style and long uniform rows of bourgeois homes and shops which emphasise not public order but class rule. The buildings stand to attention on either side of the avenue like soldiers, stiff and uniform. At the same time, the soldiers, hired tools of despotic power, march up and down the avenue, erect, uniformed, formalized, repetitive, standardised: a classic building in motion. Overawed and intimidated, the citizen as urban spectator remains fixed as life is seen to march before him. To rule by coercion the new despots of power created the appropriate urban form. Coercion was designed into the urban fabric. Active citizens became passive spectators.

[THE INDUSTRIAL CITY]

The industrial city expanded beyond scale as all things came to be subordinated to the overriding imperative of economic gain. These cities of accumulation grew with no controlling purpose other than to increase the profits of wealth-seeking capitalists. Those who reduced the city to exchange value built what they pleased and where they pleased. Economic imperatives escaped ethical, communal and public restraints.

Production was centralized in the steam-driven factory. In time, finance would centralize nearly every aspect of economic life—banks, brokerage houses, and all the attendant agencies of advertising, marketing, and publicity. With everything subordinated to commercial and financial growth imperatives, the city was now set on the path to Megalopolis. Here, in towers of concrete, steel, and glass bankers, financiers and industrialists plotted the future. Power on such abstract scale is impotence – reason now turns into its opposite.

[MEGALOPOLIS]

Unchecked, Megalopolis would degenerate into Tyrannopolis, with gangster-dictators arising in the absence of a genuine public life to impose order on a fast-disintegrating civilization, with the consent, if not cooperation, of the middle classes, and the sufferance of the inhabitants. Finally there is Nekropolis, a hollow shell of a city turned into a tomb by war, disease, and famine. The trends point to an approaching age of totalitarianism.

[Hegel-Marx and the Civil Public]

The powers currently appropriated by the state would be reappropriated by civil society and reorganised as social power, distributed among local and regional groups—towns, cities, labor unions, universities, and producer and consumer cooperatives – to form a civic public. The general purpose of the state would continue as a public realm and interest, an overarching community whose strength lay in the association and interaction of all comprising communities. The primacy purpose of the public realm would be to embody and embed the universal, preserve justice and liberty among its constituent cities, regions, communities, associations, and corporations.

[CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISM AND THE CAPITAL SYSTEM]

The need to combine social engagement with the capacity for self-direction to counterveil the encroachments of a possessive and acquisitive materialism that erodes the core of human life as it expands its power and productivity over every domain, leading to a universe that is hollow dismally empty and hollow.

The central problem of civilisation as the unquestioning commitment to boundless and endless growth. This subordination of human ends to technological, institutional and commercial expansion involves an abdication to the machine and machine processes, embroiling human beings in a mechanistic way of life. Man as machine is also man as means to external ends.

The need to break with the alien metabolic order of the industrial-technological capital system which identifies economic growth as the sine qua non of human progress. The ‘old’ politics failed to address the large systemic imperatives and merely divided on the question of how to distribute the fruits of endless, nihilistic expansion. The problem is not distribution but production, the production of endless wealth and the reproduction of an endless system. This imperative of ever-increasing economic growth, the modern idea of "progress," needs to be curtailed by a human ethic committed to the ideals of proportion, balance, and sufficiency. A material abundance would be measured by the wealth of human life not by economic possessions.

The good life entails more than the reordering of economic and political institutions. This reformation is the consequence of a prior transformation of the mode of life. There is a need to overthrow of the mechanistic mode which has brought about the psychological submission of human beings (mind, body and soul) to the machine process and the power state—creating a new personality type—bureaucratic or organisation man. The complete transformation of the consciousness of industrial man makes possible the creation of an organic mode of thought, organisation and action that embeds and expresses the union of the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, the world known to personal intuition and that described by science. This transformation of values is not the consequence of revolution but is its condition.

[ALIEN CONTROL]

The need to overthrow the domination of alien control – the alien forces of money and power which control the world through monetary, instrumental, bureaucratic and technological imperatives which compel human action to be pursued to anti-human conclusions. Economic growth and physical expansion are signs not of urban progress but of urban and human regress – the removal of the world beyond comprehensible and controllable scale. The growth imperative generates a demoralisation that destroys the moral, organisational and political capacities of the citizens, rendering them incapable of self-government in a genuine public realm. The institutional and systemic imperatives driving physical growth collides directly with culture – the force for civilisation as self-determination. Paradoxically, with the expansion of material things, human beings become more and more dissatisfied, less in control of a world that has grown too big. As the city expands in size and wealth, it becomes less capable of providing the qualities that make for an enriching and stimulating urban life – public amenities such as parks, museums, civic centers, art galleries. These nonprofitable public concerns are central to a civic culture but are diminished in favour of commercial projects designed to increase possibilities for exchange value within urban space.

[USE AND EXCHANGE VALUE IN THE CITY]

The split between the city as use value and the city as exchange value.

The ecological impact of urban expansion. The environmental concern with the city and the urban environment stems from an awareness of the city as a living biological organism, When the urban form expands beyond appropriate scale and proportion and measure, it disrupts its symbiotic relationship with its surrounding territory, eroding the ecological balance that ought to prevail between city and country in a sustainable process of urbanization. Endless physical expansion exceeds local resources, giving environing relations an exploitative character which ultimately cannot be sustained. To continue to grow, the city is forced to extend its reach for essential resources - water, fuel, food, building materials, and sewage disposal areas – effectively depriving other cities and regions of these resources in order to sustain an increasingly hollow form lacking its own autonomous resource base. Cities of growth have a parasitic relationship with its environs, generating a vicious cycle of ecological imbalance. The metropolis comes to extend itself into its proximate environment, absorbing formerly independent communities, ending autonomy and consuming precious resources - farmlands and forests – in the process. In the end the metropolis emerges as megalopolis, an ecological wasteland sustained only by parasitism. The alternative to megalopolis is to target the forces of physical expansion at source, placing the city within limits and drawing off population and industry from the bloated metropolis, creating new cities with limited populations, with others living in a surrounding greenbelt area. More important than establishing the ideal size for new settlements is to establish the principle of limits so that cities have a ecologically and socially defined size, form, and boundary.

[DECENTRALISATION AND THE CITY]

Decentralization as a biological and ecological principle. Regional cities forming city regions divide into cellular units. Each cell is based upon the neighbourhood unit and is strictly limited in size and density. The appropriate scale is determined by the capacity to perform essential social functions readily. When growth reaches a point which makes this difficult or impossible, the city ceases to be a city of workable neighbourhoods. At this point, there is further division akin to cell division, forming another functioning city. This amounts to urban growth by fission rather than endless physical expansion driven by money and power, thus checking debilitating urban sprawl. Self-organising and self-controlled urban expansion, balanced growth enabling the effective performance of the social, civic and religious functions that define a city through the activity of citizens.

[THE GREEN CITY]

The green city is a real urban settlement, compact and clearly bounded. This is distinguished from the country town or dormitory suburb. The green city comprises a broad industrial base and housing provision for all income groups. The contrast is with income-segregated, culturally homogeneous suburbs, gated communities and privatised enclaves.

To draw and retain people, the city needs to provide more than economic growth and employment but would require theatres, opera houses, libraries, bookstores, museums, and sports facilities. Since a small city could not provide this level of cultural amenity, there is a need to form a regional constellation of cities interconnected by a rapid transit system, within an overarching regional government to ensure the effective management of common purposes. A cluster of such cities would be grouped around a larger regional centre to enable the inhabitants of the urban network to access all the benefits of a metropolis without having to suffer the problems of congestion. Within the regional whole, each city could have its own cultural specialization – a theatre, a museum, art gallery – and there would be mechanisms for ensuring the equitable distribution of the region's cultural and human resources—books, art works, orchestras, dance groups, medical care, education.

The country-city balance is based on a trade-off between green and social space—places for spontaneous intercourse and interaction and civic association increasing alongside sunlight, air, private gardens, squares, and pedestrian malls. The cities would have both a green necklace around and a green ribbon within running through the neighborhoods, forming a continuous web of garden and park.

The regional city is the antidote to the overscale metropolis. The green-regional city challenges the growth imperative driving capitalist urbanisation, inaugurating the era of city-country balance and resettlement through the revaluation of place, establishing limits to growth, and respecting ecological balance. The transformation is not just one of living place, but of living habits. An urban culture governed by expansionary of profit and power needs to be transformed by a complete reorientation of values.

Ecological regionalism revalues local literature, custom. language, and ways of life, engendering public life organically from below and within through shared experiences and common activities that bind individuals people together more than any social system or political ideology. Such an approach preserves cultural differences based upon locale and place, enhancing heterogeneity against the homogeneity spreading through the expansion of a standardized metropolitan culture on a global scale.

Ecological regionalism subverts the abstract power of the nation-state, replacing an alien public life imposed and regulated in a legal-institutional sense from above with a bottom up public life.

[CIVIC NUCLEI]

The key to effectiveness in creating a built and urban form is not architecture or economic growth, the overvaluation of physical things, but the revaluation of human qualities through the provision of civic nuclei, in the form of shopping areas, schools, and parks, to draw the population together, and outer boundaries—greenbelts or roadways. These human and civic forms generate a public life, giving individuals a citizen identity that enhances their sense of belonging together. To create the city as public realm is to provide for the form and unity that the city as exchange value, as privatised sphere for economic growth, had sacrificed to endless, limitless and unbounded expansion.

This kind of urbanisation can best proceed from the neighborhood unit, creating this unit within cities as a sphere for spontaneous social interaction. By blocking off streets to traffic and by locating schools, branch libraries, small health clinics, shops, cinemas, theatres, and parks within larger blocks, the urban transit system is relieved of much of its onerous load, and provide safe environments for raising children as citizens of the public realm.

[CRITIQUE OF MATERIALIST POLITICS]

Problems with Marxist class politics. The proletariat may be the revolutionary agency given the structural capacity to act and engage in transformatory social action but, as a subordinate class within capitalism, its ideals – moral vision – is limited to having a greater share – or merely a greater amount within the same iniquitous share – of the material products of capitalist growth. If this is so, then for moral rather than socio-structural reasons, the proletariat would never lead a movement of genuine social transformation, overthrowing the growth imperative for a scaled-down, less consumption-oriented civic order. Workers have internalised the materialistic ethic of the system in which they work, however much that system exploits their labour. They therefore seem committed to the acquisitive ideals of bourgeois society and lack the moral and intellectual fibre needed to found society anew. Even the more radical trade unions appear content to restrain their structural power to forcing a better bargain over material benefits, whereas Marx thought that that structural capacity would be used to achieve real social power and responsibility within a communal and cooperative mode of life. Ironically, for an anti-moralist like Marx, the moral ideal remains the strength of his argument given the absence of his revolutionary agency. This ideal points to the morally self-sufficient, nonacquisitive life of human growth.

[COMMUNISM]

Communism as an economic system that replaces private gain with public welfare as the principal aim in production, transferring the legal rights of property ownership in land from private interests to the community. A guaranteed minimum citizen income would free individuals from the imperatives of economic necessity. This right of citizenship would allow individuals to choose between citizen and producer-consumer identities. With this in place, government can act to retard industrialism, check growth and reorient society away from the imperative of finance and commerce towards the conscious promotion of the more humane functions of life.

Redistribution and the abolition of the class system - the claims of the lower classes for a citizen income would be met by diminishing the income of the upper groups. Minimum and maximum income limits. All would be forced to accept a civilised standard of consumption. The limitations upon growth would foster a cooperative and communal ethic and engender greater self-restraint when it came to consumption habits. The watchword of the ecological age is stability against expansion.

[DEONTOLOGICAL LIBERALISM]

Deontological liberalism is a demoralisation, a relativist philosophy that induces moral failure. The deontological liberal no longer lives in a meaningful world. There is a need to distinguish the two liberalism’s here, the ideal or ethical liberalism which is a body of universal values deriving from the Judeo-Christian and Western humanist tradition; and pragmatic or political liberalism, a relativist and egoistic philosophy arising from the scientific and economic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Political liberalism shared certain common values with ideal liberalism— democracy, racial tolerance, justice.

Political or deontological liberalism suffers from an insipid value relativity and a disregard of the emotional sources of behaviour. Lacking an objective standard of values, deontological liberals slide easily into relativism and thus withhold judgment from repressive and authoritarian and irrational movements as just other views of ‘truth’. The slippery value relativism of deontological liberalism prevents it from being able to distinguish between barbarism and civilization, superstition and reason. Science is just another view of the truth, no more compelling than a religious interpretation.

Too severe a separation of reason and nature makes it difficult to make firm ethical judgments; emotions and feelings come to be subordinated to rational calculation. To divorce decision from the heated claims of passion becomes the mark of good judgement. Intellect is separated from its emotional referent. This generates dangerous problems. Distrusting the emotions, lacking moral certainty, embracing relativity in values, the deontological liberal is incapable of discerning the destructive potential of real repressive and authoritarian movements. If any commitment to truth becomes potentially repressive and authoritarian, and if moral relativity justifies scepticism, then there is no way of distinguishing those genuinely committed to truth, affirming recognised logical and empirical controls, from those who recognise no such criteria.

[CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE]

The machine state started to be reassembled toward the end of the Middle Ages. The emphasis on calculation and book-keeping, the rise of political absolutism, and the introduction of the clock, under capitalism prepared the ground for a modern machine on an increased scale.

Even the old sky and sun gods of the ancient machine appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Copernicus and Kepler ushering in the new science. With Bacon and Newton, this new science made not only man but nature a machine. Significantly, a clock.

The concern for order, regularity, and regimentation is not unique to the modern world. Before Benthamic panopticism became the ordering principle of capitalist modernity there was the routinized world of the medieval monastery. This concern extended to the army and the counting-house before it finally entered the world of production to give birth to the factory. The time and work discipline of the factory itself was dependent upon the prior invention of the mechanical clock. This invention played a crucial role in the psychic transformation accompanying modernisation. The mechanical clock rather than any of the catalogue of inventions like the steam engine was the decisive machine of the industrial age. The mechanical clock replaced the times, seasons and rhythms of nature with an artificial regularity and regimentation, an external tempo that caused human life to beat to an unnatural pulse. The clock was the means of keeping track of the hours and served as a means of synchronizing human behaviour.

In the monastery, the daily movements of the monks was regulated by the ringing of the bells. The first clocks were first used in monasteries to regulate this ringing of the bells, a doubly efficient system of timekeeping which became central to industrial capitalism. If time really was money, then there was a primacy on becoming "as regular as clockwork". This regularity formed "the bourgeois ideal" in running an efficient and profitable system of production and transportation.

With the invention of the mechanical clock, one sees how scientific and technological advance from the sixteenth century to the Age of Reason was crucial in creating the mental and material terrain for industrialisation. This terrain rested on an increasing separation of nature and reason, the increasing abstraction of civilisation from a natural existence.

The mechanical clock enabled human beings to wrest control of time from nature, generating a new conception of time which fitted the imperatives of the commercial system. In science and economics there came to be a commensurate concern with exactitude in measurement, standardisation and quantification. The industrial revolution thus emerged out of the new scientific view of the world. This view was mechanistic to the core. The scientific exaltation of knowledge soon developed into an urge to comprehend and control the physical world. Knowledge came to be connected with an abstract power over nature. Such a science lost sight of the wider ethical questions, of human nature and of nature as such as alive, and instead conceived as real and rational only those – limited and narrow - elements of experience that were knowable in being external and repeatable. Knowledge in this conception was limited to what could be analysed and verified by careful experimentation. The Baconic view of science put nature on the wrack and desacrilised existence, long before capitalism and commodification profaned all that is holy. Existence came to be broken down, atomised, into discrete units that could be weighed, measured or counted. Nothing else existed. With nature defined as a lifeless and purposeless machine, human life came to be abstracted from its organic roots and located instead in a mechanistic world of functional, technological, commercial and institutional imperatives. The loss of the sacred in this sense was also the suppression of the organic, leaving human beings defenceless in face of the machine. The subordination of life to the machine which characterised the contemporary world is based upon the prior surrender of ethical imperatives rooted in a sense of the sacred and the organic. The result is a mechanistic mode of life oriented to the artificial tempo and imperatives of high-speed technology, and subordinating life to the technological ideals of specialization, automation, and rationality.

The critique of modern science. In order to comprehend and control nature, scientists like Bacon and Newton had to simplify it, breaking it down into component parts, impose abstractions through formulas, laws, numbers. Nature was analysed in order to be quantified—first time, quickly followed by space and motion. The principal role in this abstraction of reality was played by the clock, making it possible to dissociate time from human events and fostering the belief that human beings had the power to superimpose upon nature an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, definitions, laws, the special world of science.

The problem is not science as such but, first, the narrow conception of science which limited reality to the knowable by experimentation and experience, and second, science as divorced from conscience. As a result, scientific insight was not accompanied by an increase in moral insight or human understanding. Far from inaugurating a world of reason, scientific advance at the expense of a collapse of moral belief and meaning invites irrationalism.

The conception of mechanistic scientific is form achieved at the expense of content, a skeletal view of human life in providing something clear, hard and precise but lacking in flesh, vision, movement and life. Physical nature as conceived by Galileo and Newton was definite, neat and orderly. It was a world of regular laws, but lacking in moral value and meaning. A world without organic life, without memory or consciousness, a world of rarefied abstractions and laws, was not a world that human beings could identify with or see themselves in. It is a strange demi-world with the interesting bits left out for the priests, prophets, poets and artists to salvage. Enter William Blake.

In the pursuit of "objectivity", scientists, and those in the humanities who thought that social life could be evaluated on the same lines, neglected and devalued as non- or irrational whole realms of experience that science was incapable of understanding, and hence declared meaningless. The concentration upon hard, empirical knowledge left much of life untouched. This was the irrational, unscientific aspect of life that could not be encapsulated by cold abstraction, measured and quantified. The worlds of religion, arts and letters remained more trustworthy guides to the more expressive emotional side of experience.

The principal theme of the book is the stripping down of life to essentials and its building up from these essentials to criticise civilisation from within and see if and how its progress can be reoriented in ways which correspond to the imperative and needs of life on earth.

The main task of our time is to overcome a social order in which human beings are passive objects, mere means of external forces, in favour of a social order which is based upon conscious human creative agency. One can examine religion and identify the basis of the religious impulse to call for the recovery of the soul. For Jung, the unconscious is inherently and ineradicably religious. The project joins here with psychology and the concern with the self. The recovery of the soul and the reassertion of the self is a crucial stage in the process of social renewal. Inner change is the key to outer change; the two go together through praxis – change as self-change. Religion, psychology and Marxism.

[POWER MACHINE]

The book examines the anatomy of cities and states as machine complexes facilitated by science and technology as well as economic power. From their origins to their inner workings, these power machine complexes are psychological as well as physiological, embracing, manipulating and altering bodies and minds together.

Although lacking physical machines, the ancient Egyptians were able to produce buildings that bore all the hallmarks of machine precision and perfection. This is machine work without physical machines. The stones of the pyramids are cut to an optician's standard of precision and they were hauled across the blazing desert and placed into position without the aid of a wheeled wagon, pulley, or windlass. The pyramids had been built by a machine, a human machine comprising entirely human parts. The prime mover was the deified Pharaoh, the assembling agent below whom a supervisory body regulated a highly centralized and coordinated labour system. This is a model of the human being and the human community as a machine in the service of a power myth. The understanding of this point establishes the roots of the contemporary overmechanized culture in the mechanistic mentrality by which human beings are induced to think of themselves as mere cogs in a larger impersonal system. Treated thus, the machine mentality soon becomes second nature.

The interesting thing about the conflict between science and religion from the sixteenth century is how much scientific advance also involved the return of the ancient sky gods, most prominently Atum-Re, the self-created sun god. With the scientific revolution inaugurated by Copernicus, the sun became supreme once more, the centre of the universe. With this discovery, science claimed the monopoly of genuine knowl­edge. In time, the scientists brought the machine-like order and regularity they discerned in the heavens, in the regular revolution of planets around the sun, down to earth. Astronomy and celestial mechanics defined an earthly ideal which turned nature into a machine, man into a machine and prepared the grounds for political absolutism under the nation state and economic absolutism in the time and work discipline of factory production. The founding fathers of modern science —Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and New­ton — allied with "mechanistic" philosophers to turn nature, human nature, society into a machine. This was the mental and cultural context for the subsequent overorganization of modern life. Extending outwards from the armies and bureaucracies of absolute rulers like Peter the Great, Frederick the Great and Louis XIV, machine values have encompassed almost every area of human activity. Sex is nature’s last gasp, wrote Weber. Although sex has been as much a target for regulation as other aspects of human life, the profoundly sexual nature of human beings, reaching deep into the unconscious, means that sex continues to evade easy capture. Nature’s last gasp may also be humanity’s last chance.

Karl Marx makes labour the key to revolutionary social transformation. Yet work was the first human quality to submit, the capital system capturing the workshop and removing worker autonomy after 1750. The essential aspect of industrialization is not the introduction of technical inventions on a large scale but the relieving of workers of their technical knowledge and its monopolisation by an elite of scientists and experts. This destruction of worker autonomy and self-initiative made possible a more regimented way of organizing work and life through the passivity of the workers. A new personality type emerged, the Organization Man, specialists without spirit and without heart and without soul, all handed over to the system. The history of technology needs to be considered alongside related changes in values and social rela­tions, emphasising the fact that social, cultural and mental changes may prefigure large-scale mechanization as much as follow it.

The twentieth century machine system requires a "symbolic figure of absolute power, incarnated in a living ruler, a corporate group, or a super-machine; and a crisis sufficiently portentous and pressing to bring about an implosion of all the necessary components." Inefficient human parts are replaced by mechani­cal and electronic substitutes, and with large well-drilled armies backed by nuclear weapons. A system of cosmic authority is backed by bombs of cosmic violence. The nuclear bomb exalts science to political power and gives scien­tists the sacred place once occupied by priests. The deified warrior kings have developed into leaders backed by an alliance of scientists and the military elite, holding a secret knowledge and power cut off from inspection or control by the rest of the community. Once again, people have ceased to be citizens and have instead become spectators.

By constantly inventing enemies and emergencies, creating conflicts and institutionalising a state of permanent war, the machine state frees itself from democratic control and rules by control of energy as power, production and profit, bureaucratic control and propaganda.

The ICT revolution threatens finally to end personal privacy and autonomy and bring all under central control. The computer is a tool of mass control by which the political elite compel total conformity and obedience to their commands. Nothing and no-one can escape control. As the technology expands, no action, no thought, and maybe no dream will be able to escape. The computer can read the human eye, the human body. Ultimately, this could eliminate autonomy as irrational, i.e. as failing to conforming to rational machine values. This is the final destruction of the human soul.

But the power is a myth and is vulnerable to human beings retaining their humanity and withdrawing or withholding alle­giance. This means having not just the intelligence but the backbone to refuse the privileges and pleasures promised by "megatechnic" affluence—a promise that rests upon another myth, that endless material consumption is the main aim of life and that the economic growth which allows this promise to be made can go on forever. "For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty, ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out."

This sounds like a call for people to become like the old desert fathers, retreat into the wilderness for reflection and return with a new vision for the world. The world may need its priests and prophets. For all of the millions who were members of the socialist parties, revolutionary and reformist, marching, striking, demonstrating and voting, their efforts have been rewarded with the strengthening of capitalism through its being invested with a more social and welfare orientation – for the moment. The fact that the proletarian revolution was bought off only goes to show the extent to which the socialists subscribed to the values of bourgeois materialism and affluence, wanting no more than a larger share for themselves. Historically, the most effective rev­olutionary movements have been those that took ideas, values, morals and principles more seriously. They were started by individuals and small groups who opted for an indirect assault, a passive resistance, nibbling away at the edges, wearing the system down by upsetting routines and breaking regulations. The point is not to capture the power at the centre but to withdraw power from it and diffuse it in the parts, thus paralyzing the centre and strengthening the autonomy of the alternative centres. This means looking again at the way of interpreting Marx’s practical reappropriation of alien power and its reorganisation as social power.