It is time for a Lewis Mumford Revival

It is time for a Lewis Mumford Revival

"Today, it’s time for a Lewis Mumford Revival. Many people are experiencing the present moment as a new dark age, full of foreboding over disease outbreaks, climate change, economic inequality, racial and religious bigotry, technological overload, refugee crises, neo-fascism, and near-constant warfare. Mumford analyzed these kinds of trends with an admirable frankness, always hoping to redirect modern energies toward more humane formulations that might counter some of the violence and trauma."

Rediscovering Melville and Mumford By Aaron Sachs August 22, 2022

“Mumford, a once-renowned but now forgotten thinker, spent many of his 94 years studying the relationships between human beings and the technologies we create. Never quite a prophet of doom, he harboured grave doubts about the dehumanisation at work in “machine societies”; doubts that only deepened as the 20th century wore on.”

“Neither man dies unhappy. But both die in relative obscurity.”

I never forgot Mumford and have done all I can to bring his message to an age that needs it most.

Up from the Depths by Aaron Sachs review – riveting journey into the worlds of Melville and Mumford

"Without food man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time." (Lewis Mumford The Conduct of Life 1952: 30).

I live in hope that people will rediscover Lewis Mumford. He was described as "The forgotten American environmentalist" by Ramachandra Guha in a paper of 1991, subtitled "An essay in rehabilitation." I've worked long and hard in the attempt to recover the insights of Lewis Mumford in the contemporary age. Lewis Mumford was a beautiful writer, with almost every other paragraph of his worthy of quoting. But you need to immerse yourself. His texts are nuanced and richly detailed, his arguments revealing their qualities by way of their interweaving. I describe Mumford as an artist-ethicist-essayist beyond academic specialisation. A thorough grounding in Mumford alerts you to danger signs of psychic and intellectual preparation for entry into the Megamachine. He was writing of the loss of virtues back in the 30s and 40s, in Values for Survival and other works. For that, he has been dismissed as "moralistic," which suggests to me one reason why his work has fallen out of favour. He has also been classed, mystifyingly, with elitist, technocratic planners. He has also, and just as ludicrously, been accused of being anti-technology and anti-civ. People need to read Mumford as he presents his arguments, aside from their own perspectives and concerns. Mumford was an ecologist who emphasised the virtues as qualities for a flourishing existence. Long before Alasdair MacIntyre, Mumford warned that the virtues had become an almost forgotten language. The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre and Lewis Mumford The new article refers to Mumford’s connections to Herman Melville. He was also influenced by Dante Alighieri. Mumford wrote that Dante Alighieri seems to be ‘the most distant of poets, not because we have left him behind, but because he strides on ahead of us.’ That’s a view shared by poet Osip Mandelstam, who writes that ‘it is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They are missiles for capturing the future.’ Mumford identified Dante as a poet of synthesis and new life, inspiring his ambitions to produce an integral philosophy that encompassed life in all its dimensions. Dante helped Mumford to find his way out of the ‘rough and stubborn wood’ into which he had stumbled in his life: ‘Dante’s vision of good and evil was of more use to me than Freud’s psychoanalytic insight’ (Lewis Mumford, My Works and Days 1979: 298-99). Paul Tillich characterised Dante’s Comedy as ‘the greatest poetic expression of the Existentialist point of view in the Middle Ages.’ The Comedy is a timeless and universal work in that all life and all people in living context are written into its psychic fabric. Lewis Mumford recalls that when he asked Ananda Coomaraswamy to define the three gunas (qualities) described in the Bhagavad-Gita, "he replied with illustrative passages from Dante's Divine Comedy." (Mumford The Transformations of Man 1957 ch 5 p 83). The comparison makes it clear that the virtues are the qualities that human beings need in order to live well. Mumford turned to the poets and giants of literature like Dostoyevsky when in need of psychic depth. Into his tenth decade, Mumford was still citing his favourite line from poetry: “Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world.” It’s from Tennyson’s Ulysses. I have done exceedingly good work on Mumford these past twenty years. Read it! Lewis Mumford, Civic Environmentalism and Ecological Regionalism (2014) Lewis Mumford and the Architectonics of Ecological Civilisation (2012) Lewis Mumford and the Search for the Harmonious City: The Architectonics of an Ecological Regionalism (2004) This next work was cut short through ill-health in 2018. Part III is outlines for a proposed book on Mumford that was curtailed because of incessant editorial interference in the creative process of writings. It had the makings of a great book, but I work alone. The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020)

"Unless we now rebuild our selves all our external triumphs will crumble. There is no easy formula for this renewal. It is not enough for us to do all that is possible: we must do that which seems impossible. Our first need is not for organization but for orientation: a change in direction and attitude. We must bring to every activity and every plan a new criterion of judgement: we must ask how far it seeks to further the processes of life-fulfilment and how much respect it pays to the needs of the whole personality. More immediately we must demand: What is the purpose of each new political and economic measure? Does it seek the old goal of expansion or the new one of equilibrium? Does it work for conquest or co-operation? And what is the nature of this or that industrial or social achievement— does it produce material goods alone or does it also produce human goods and good men? Do our individual life-plans make for a universal society, in which art and science, truth and beauty, religion and sanctity, enrich mankind? Do our public life-plans make for the fulfilment and renewal of the human person, so that they will bear fruit in a life abundant: ever more significant, ever more valuable, ever more deeply experienced and more widely shared? If we keep this standard constantly in mind, we shall have both a measure for what must be rejected and a goal for what must be achieved. In time, we shall create the institutions and the habits of life, the rituals, the laws, the arts, the morals that are essential to the development of the whole personality and the balanced community: the possibilities of progress will become real again once we lose our blind faith in the external improvements of the machine alone. But the first step is a personal one: a change in direction of interest towards the person. Without that change, no great betterment will take place in the social order. Once that change begins, everything is possible." Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man, 1944 chapter 11 "The age of the machine is already over. We cannot save our cunning inventions and our complicated apparatus of scientific research unless we save man; and when we do so, the human person, not the machine, will dominate the scene. The New World Symphony of exploration and conquest, and the Ballet Mecanique of modern industrialism have both been performed to the point of exhaustion. The next number on the program will be scored for a full orchestra and a multitude of human voices, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: a mass for the dead, a hymn for the living, a paean to the unborn: the Oratorio of One World and of a new man capable of being at home in that world. For each of us, the moment of reorientation and renewal has come. There is no mechanical device capable of effecting this transformation in society: it, must first take place in the minds and hearts of individual men, who have the courage to re-educate themselves to the realities of the present human situation, and, step by step, take command of it. Up to the limits of his capacities and insights, each one of us must undertake his self-examination, re-appraise his standards and values, alter his attitudes and expectations, and re-direct his interest. That hour will demand a capacity for humility and sacrifice difficult under any circumstances; but particularly difficult to a generation for whom these words awaken only contempt or self-justifying resistance." Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life, 1952 chapter 1 Mumford identified the malaise of the age decades ago: "Civilisation begins by a magnificent materialisation of human purpose: it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it." (Mumford The Transformations of Man 1957 ch 3). Mumford saw the intellectual and psychic preparation underway leading us into the Megamachine. He was calling for withdrawal and conversion long before MacIntyre (he died an elderly man the year after MacIntyre's After Virtue, when MacIntyre famously declared that the barbarians are already ruling over us, and part of our predicament is that we are not conscious of that fact).

These words of Lewis Mumford are as valid today as when they were written in 1946. “If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will--and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements--we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one's own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values. If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.” - Lewis Mumford, Values for Survival The world lives under the sign and shadow of various totalizing and life-denying and destroying abstractions which name and claim the lives of each and all. There is no 'third way' out of this, no technological workaround, and no place to run to in an attempt to opt-out. There's no free space, no exit however you want to fantasize it. T.S. Eliot wrote a fitting epitaph for such a world: “And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls.” 'In 1968, Lewis Mumford gave an address at a symposium, “Challenge for Survival” sponsored by The Rockefeller University and The New York Botanical Garden. The address admonished modern life for abandoning a more sustainable way of living that would embrace a “close symbiotic partnership” between human beings and the plant world.. At the center of Mumford’s critique was the “machine-centered civilization” that devoured the environment and enslaved humankind. For Mumford the modern machine was suicidal and reckless, and the wheels of production, consumption, and shameless greed would be our undoing. Its ideological promise of salvation would be our damnation. Our lives, he argued, would be “dreary and useless,“ and the “planet unfit for supporting life.” Mumford urged us to reject this “anti-organic regimen” because it has little faith in life or love... Segregation and isolation must be replaced by resurrecting communities of intimacy with nature and each other.' The Flowering of Plants and Men by Lewis Mumford. Address given at a symposium, 'Challenge for Survival,' sponsored by The New York Botanical Garden and The Rockefeller University "If we are to recover both our ecological and our cultural balance, we must subject our entire economy to a rigorous examination, and deal with our difficulties at their source, instead of paying attention to them only when they have become so embedded in the whole structure of production and consumption that they cannot be removed except with heroic exertions and at extravagant cost. In other words, instead of becoming heartsick over our littered roadsides, our rubbish dumps, our auto cemeteries, we must challenge the whole economy of the disposable container. Instead of just fighting against turning our last wetlands into jet ports, we must challenge the notion that all other human needs should be sacrificed to fast transportation. In short, we must dare to question the religion of the machine, and be ready to flout the superstitious observances and taboos that have been erected to ensure the supremacy of automation, computerism, and electronic communication over more important services to human life that the wilderness areas, the cultivated farmland and parkland, vineyards and orchards produce. If we intend to provide for the survival of plants and men, we had better become iconoclasts of this machine-centered religion: we must throw down these idols, and ask the bat-eyed priests of technology what on earth they think they are doing. Obviously, the Earth, in all its variety and complexity of environments, is the last place for which they feel any sense of responsibility: they are off on dizzy trips to outer space—"trips" in both present senses of the word. One of the high priests of this religion, Buckminster Fuller, has even said, seemingly with a straight face, that the space capsule is the one truly perfect environment yet invented by man; and it is increasingly plain that the chief end of this religion is to reduce the Earth itself to a space capsule: the most deadly, defunctionalized, dehumanized environment that the mind of man has yet conceived—compared to which the most backward neolithic mud village was a paradise of creativity and human autonomy. Instead of defending our position, putting up a dreary rearguard fight against the armies that are conquering the Earth for the sake of unlimited power and profit and prestige, the time has come for man and his plants to join forces in a counterattack. Mere survival is not good enough: we must devise a strategy to ensure the further development of plants and men. The odds against our success are far from hopeless, for in fact, all life is on our side—and has been since the very beginning, slow though we have been to realize this fact. Here I return to my original theme: we have something to learn from the plants. The flowering plants, above all, have much to teach us about our own nature. Not by accident, the young, who are in revolt against our power-stricken and machine-regimented society, have seized upon the symbolism of the flower, and call themselves "flower children." In a very innocent, simpleminded, sometimes downright silly way, they have used the flower symbol to express their rejection of this automated and computerized and life-hostile technology. We, too, must learn to be flower children again, and rejoin the old procession and pageant of life... The capacity for exuberant expression symbolized by efflorescence—this is the primal gift of life; and to consciously maintain it and guard it and expand it is one of the ultimate reasons for human existence. There are no mechanical or electronic substitutes for this kind of creativity. But observe: our present-day civilization, in allowing its neolithic foundations to crumble, now finds itself in a curious position. Thanks to man's superb intelligence and his ability to translate mathematical and physical abstractions into practical inventions, the gift of exuberance has been transferred from the world of living organisms to the world of machines, electronic apparatus, and power utilities. Here we are deliberately displacing organic variety and replacing it with a more limited mechanical variety... As if the lethal smog from our multimillion cars and factory chimneys were not a sufficient threat to life, we extend the area of poisoning by spraying pesticides and herbicides recklessly over the landscape, and by pouring detergents into already heavily polluted streams. The birds and the insects now exist in ever-dwindling numbers, thanks largely to DDT—a nerve poison whose use should never have been permitted—and the vegetables and flowers and fruits dependent upon their co-operation in fertilization will, if this process goes on, be doomed. Hence the morbid interest some biologists have shown in developing sub-foods, from algae and yeasts. But the full meaning of this attack upon every mode of life by our war-directed technology has hardly yet been grasped. What it means, at bottom, is that we are regressing from the age of mammals, birds, and flowers, back to the age of the cold-blooded reptiles. Before we let the armored reptiles and the flying reptiles reconquer the planet, we had better take a good hard look at the kind of existence that is now offered to us as the highest expression of our scientific age. Why should we offer homage to machines, as if they were superior kinds of organisms, and think so humbly and distrustfully about the human mind, with its incalculable reserves of potential creativity, provided it keeps hold of our historic nature and in touch with all its co-operating resources in the living environment. Why should we accept the notion of an expanding economy as a method of salvation, when actually what we need is a balanced economy, which will put the needs of life before the claims of profit, prestige, or power. Why should we waste our surplus on mechanical gadgets and inane superfluities, when we might be cultivating our gardens and bringing forth new plants—some if possible with a higher protein content!—that we never cultivated before. Why should we invest public funds in sterile highrise tenements, in all their dreary uniformity, when the environment of life demands homes, gardens, communities that express individuality and identity, as every natural species does, as a condition for normal development. Why, to put it briefly, should we value parking lots above parks…. Every city should be a garden city, for gardens can give more intense sensory awakening and delight than any noxious halucinogen. These are not private questions or peculiar answers. The young are already asking them. If we had not shut our minds to feedback, we should all of us have been asking them long ago. It is incredible that it was only in 1938 that Landsberg wrote about Air Pollution, and no one else had taken the subject seriously, except in terms of dirt, though as Landsberg wisely pointed out, the smoke nuisance was the subject of a constructive paper by John Evelyn three whole centuries ago. Yet it is more absurd to tolerate a technology producing high-speed changes on a world-wide scale, but with no apparatus for detecting its errors, no effective public method for correcting them, and no willingness to utilize the scientific information available if this threatens to limit its continued expansion and profit making. The Romans, in their high regard for justice, used to say "Let justice prevail, though the ceiling fall." But our technocrats are so committed to the worship of the sacred cow of technology that they say in effect: Let the machine prevail, though the earth be poisoned, the air be polluted, the food and water be contaminated, and mankind itself be condemned to a dreary and useless life, on a planet no more fit to support life than the sterile surface of the moon. It is against this miscarriage of science and technology, this wholesale curtailment of the possibilities of life, this continued threat of collective extermination by nuclear bombardment that might wipe out all higher life on this planet, or by slower but equally deadly modes of poisoning, that the young today are in revolt. In their use of the flower as the symbol of vitality and creativity, of unashamed sexuality and love, they are reminding us of the terms upon which men and plants have not only survived but prospered together—with the aid, of course, of all the other species and orders whose combined activities have produced a living environment. Unless we change our minds, as the young are doing, and alter our whole routine of living, we shall not need a nuclear war to bring the whole evolutionary process to a halt. So my final word to you is to remember what the young are saying to us, in words that were first used by John Ruskin: "There is no wealth but Life."—Let it flower!"