42
" The classic summation of Galileo's conception was made by David Hume, a brilliant mind that, under the cover of complete skepticism established the new outlook as a dogma. "When we run over libraries," Hume noted, "persuaded by these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
44
" Yet even these missionaries of mechanical progress cannot entirely ignore the older passion for nature that still survives as an essential part of our New World heritage; for they have invented a prefabricated substitute for the wilderness, or at least an ingenious equivalent for the hunter's campfire. That ancient paleolithic hearth has become a backyard picnic grill, where, surrounded by plastic vegetation, factory-processed frankfurters are broiled on an open fire made with pressed charcoal eggs, brought to a combustion point by an electric torch connected by wire to a distant socket, while the assembled company views, either on television or on a domestic motion-picture screen, a travelogue through an African game preserve, or scenes with the grizzly bears in Yellowstone. Ah! Wilderness. For many of my own countrymen this is, I fear, the terminus of the pioneers' New World dream. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
45
" But an even more tragic paradox sullied the New World dream and made it impossible to begin life afresh under a new sky. For the high cultures that were already established in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes were not in any sense primitive or new, still less did they represent more acceptable human ideals than those the Old World cultures had put forward. The conquistadors of Mexico and Peru found a native population so rigidly regimented, so completely deprived of initiative, that in Mexico, as soon as their king, Montezuma, was captured and unable to give orders they offered little or no overt resistance to the invaders. Here, in short, in the 'New' world was the same institutional complex that had shackled civilization since its beginnings in Mesopotamia and Egypt: slavery, caste, war, divine kingship, and even the religious sacrifice of human victims on altars-sometimes as with the Aztecs on an appalling scale. Politically speaking, Western imperialism was carrying coals to Newcastle. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
46
" Thus facility in making automatic, power-driven machines, which resulted in enormous gains in productivity in essential industries like textiles, was accompanied, as it had been in the Pyramid Age, by the practice of debasing the worker to the level of machine: depleting health, deforming the body, shortening the life of the worker, and driving the unemployed into pauperdom and beggary, starvation and death. This dehumanization of the living worker was complemented, paradoxically, by the progressive hominization of the machine-hominization in the sense of giving the automaton some of the mechanical equivalents of lifelike motion and purpose, a process that has come to a striking consummation in our own day. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
48
" Even when one restricts the notion of progress to conquering space and time, its human limitations are flagrant. Take one of Buckminster Fuller's favorite illustrations of the shrinkage of time and space, beginning with a sphere twenty feet in diameter, to represent transportation time-distance by walking. With the use of the horse, this sphere gets reduced in size to six feet, with the clipper ship, it becomes a basketball, with the railroad, a baseball, with the jet plane, a marble, and with the rocket, a pea. And if one could travel at the speed of light, one might add, to round off Fuller's idea, the earth would become, from the standpoint of bodily velocity, a molecule, so that one would be back at the starting point without having even the briefest sensation of having left.
By so carrying Fuller's illustration to its theoretic extreme, one reduces this mechanical concept to its proper degree of human irrelevance. For like every other technical achievement, speed has a meaning only in relation to other human needs and purposes. Plainly, the effect of speeding transportation is to diminish the possibilities of direct human experience-even the experience of travel. A person who undertook to walk around the earth would actually, at the end of that long journey, have stored up rich memories of its geographic, climatic, esthetic, and human realities: these experiences retreat in direct ratio to speed, until at the climax of rapid movement, the traveller can have no experience at all: his world has become a static one, in which time and motion work no changes whatever. Not merely space but man shrinks. Because of the volume of jet travel and the rapid turnover of tourists, this means of transport has already ruined beyond repair many of the precious historic sites and cities that incited this mass visitation. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
49
" But no organism could survive in the rarefied world that the physicist, up to the present generation, regarded as the real one, the abstract area of mass and motion-any more than man could survive without massive equipment on the life-forsaken moon. The actual world occupied by organisms is one of literally indescribable richness and complexity: a life-furthering accumulation of molecules, organisms, species, each bearing the impress of countless functional adaptations and selective transformations, the residue of billions of years of evolution.
Of these vast transformations only an infinitesimal part is visible or can be reduced to any mathematical order. Form, color, odor, tactile sensations, emotions, appetites, feelings, images, dreams, words, symbolic abstractions-that plenitude of life which even the humblest being in some degree exhibits-cannot be resolved in any mathematical equation or converted into a geometric metaphor without eliminating a large part of the relevant experience. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
50
" All this would indicate, not technical insufficiency, but rather the fatal absence of a just system of distribution: a conclusion that is re-enforced by Benjamin Franklin's estimate, well before megatechnics had taken hold, that if work and reward and consumption standards were more evenly distributed, a five hour day would suffice to supply all human needs. If, on the other hand, the machine economy has now transcended these limitations, how is it that in the United States more than a quarter of the population lacks an income sufficient to provide a minimums standard of living? "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
51
" Recent experiment shows that on the contrary, the human brain, so far from having the limitations of a computer, which can work only with definite symbols and exact images, has a marvellous capacity for coping with vague, indistinct, and confused data, making sense out of information so incomplete that it would paralyze a computer-as in translating a wide range of sounds, tones, different pronunciations into the same intelligible words. It is these unifying properties of the human mind, with its ability constantly to bring together symbolically relevant portions of the past, the present, and the future, that has made it possible for man to react with some measure of success to a diversified environment and an open world, instead of retreating into a safe niche, with a limited range of opportunities and responses, like all other species. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
52
" As it turned out, the wilderness that Western man had failed to explore was the dark continent of his own soul, that very 'Heart of Darkness' which Joseph Conrad depicted, released by its distance from Old World sanctions, throwing off archaic taboos, conventional wisdom, and religious inhibitions, and obliterating every trace of neighborly love and humility. Wherever Western man went, slavery, land robbery, lawlessness, culture wrecking,a nd the outright extermination of both wild beasts and tame men went with him: for the only force that he now respected-an enemy with equal power to inflict damage on him-was lacking, once his feet were firmly established on the new soil. Within half a dozen years after Columbus' landing the Spaniards, a contemporary observer estimated, had killed off one and a half million natives. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
55
" That there have been considerable gains in many old areas is beyond doubt; and that there has been a creative enrichment through many new technological processes and products is equally evident. But the nineteenth-century exponents of 'progress,' and their old-fashioned disciples today, falsified the picture by failing to take account of the accompanying losses-above all, losses brought about through the deliberate extirpation of the handicraft tradition itself, with its immense storage of human experience and skill, only a small part of which has been passed on in the design and fabrication of machines. On this score, Leibnitz's observation still holds: "Concerning unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings, I am convinced that it surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth is not yet recorded." Most of that unrecorded wealth, deplorably, is now lost forever. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
56
" Organized political power backed by coercive weapons is the source of both property and productivity: first of all in the cultivation of the land, using sunpower, and then at later stages in every other mode of production. Mechanical productivity, linked to widening markets, spell profit; and without the dynamic stimulus of profit-that is, money power-the system could not so rapidly expand. This perhaps explains why cruder forms of the megamachine, which favored the military caste rather than the merchant and industrial producer, and relied on tribute and pillage, remained static, and in the end unproductive and unprofitable to the point of repeated bankruptcy. Finally, no less an integral part of the power system is publicity (prestige, panache), through which the merely human directors of the power complex-the military, bureaucratic, industrial, and scientific elite-are inflated to more than human dimensions in order better to maintain authority. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
57
" But there is another error, the reverse of magnifying the role of power, that it would be equally fatal to make: one that now treacherously tempts the younger generation: the notion that in order to avoid the predictable calamities that the power complex is bringing about, one must destroy the whole fabric of historic civilization and begin all over again on an entirely fresh foundation. Unfortunately that 'fresh' foundation, as envisaged by such revolutionary groups, includes the forms of mass communication, mass transportation, and mass indoctrination abetted by violence that favor, not human liberation, but a mass dictatorship, possibly even more dehumanized than the present affluent Establishment, since it renounces as worthless and irrelevant our immense cultural accumulations. As if ignorance and impotence were viable solutions! As if human institutions could be improvised overnight! "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)