122
" The obstacle to achieving such vocational diversification and general aptitude does not lie in the human character as such, but rather in the mass of qualifying educational and vocational restrictions imposed by every privileged group in order to maintain its special status, emoluments, and perquisites. Though the reputed object of these regulations is often laudable, as measures to ensure competence and protect members from unqualified rivals, the underlying aim is to prevent fresh activities and organizations from arising in competition with the power system. As a result, the scope of human initiative through direct action becomes limited: today the smallest new measure must run a gauntlet of licensing laws, professional codes, trades union regulations, wage schedules, promotion priorities, bureaucratic restrictions and inspections. Even the exigencies of war were only partly able to break down or bypass these barriers-for where are they more deeply entrenched than in the military machine itself?
This explains, perhaps, why there is so little prospect of overcoming the defects of the power system by any attack that employs mass organizations and mass efforts at persuasion; for these mass methods support the very system they attack. The changes that have so far been effective, and that give promise of further success, are those that have been initiated by animated individual minds, small groups, and local communities nibbling at the edges of the power structure by breaking routines and defying regulations. Such an attack seeks, not to capture the citadel of power, but to withdraw from it and quietly paralyze it. Once such initiatives become widespread, as they at last show signs of becoming, it will restore power and confident authority to its proper source: the human personality and the small face-to-face community. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
124
" To dismiss the most central fact of man's being because it is inner and subjective is to make the hugest subjective falsification possible-one that leaves out the most critical half of man's nature. For without that underlying subjective flux, as experienced in floating imagery, dreams, bodily impulses, formative ideas, projections, and inventions-and above all with increasing lucidity in language-the world that is open to human experience can neither be described nor rationally understood. When our age learns that lesson, it will have made the first move toward redeeming for human use the mechanized and electrified wasteland that is now being constructed, at man's expense and to his permanent loss, for the benefit of the mega-machine. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
126
" Though other cultures-like the Sumerian, the Mayan, and the Indic-coupled human destiny with long vistas of abstract calendar time, the essential contribution of the Renascence was to relate the cumulative results of history to the variety of cultural achievements that marked the successive generations. By unburying statues, monuments, buildings, cities, by reading old books and inscriptions, by re-entering a long-abandoned world of ideas, these new explorers in time became aware of fresh potentialities in their own existence. These pioneers of the mind invented a time-machine more wonderful than H.G. Wells' technological contraption.
At a moment when the new mechanical world-picture had no place for 'time' except as a function of movement in space, historic time-duration, in Henri Bergson's sense, which includes persistence through replication, imitation, and memory-began to play a conscious part in day-to-day choices. If the living present could be visibly transformed, or at least deliberately modified from Gothic to a formalized Classic structure, so could the future be remolded, too. Historic time could be colonized and cultivated, and human culture itself became a collective artifact. The sciences actually profited by this historic restoration, getting a fresh impetus from Thales, Democritus, Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
127
" But what shall we say of the counter-Luddites, the systematic craft-wreckers, of the machine: the ruthless enterprisers who, during the last two centuries, have in effect confiscated the tools, destroyed the independent workshops, and wiped out the living traditions of handicraft culture? What they have done is to debase a versatile and still viable polytechnics to a monotechnics, and at the same time they have sacrificed human autonomy and variety to a system of centralized control that becomes increasingly more automatic and compulsive. If, two centuries earlier, they had fully succeeded in extirpating the handicraft traditions of the primitive peoples, rubber would not play the part it now does in our advanced technology. Were these craft-wreckers afraid to let handiwork survive lest it join forces, against their financial interests, with the human heart? "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
128
" Mass Mobilization of Youth
Despite the well-founded dissatisfaction of the younger generation with the kind of life offered by the bloated affluence of megatechnic society, their very mode of rebellion too often demonstrates that the power system still has them in its grip: they, too mistake indolence for leisure and irresponsibility for liberation. The so-called Woodstock Festival was no spontaneous manifestation of joyous youth, but a strictly money-making enterprise, shrewdly calculated to exploit their rebellions, their adulations, and their illusions. The success of the festival was based ont he tropismic attraction of 'Big Name' singers and groups (the counter-culture's Personality Cult!), idols who command colossal financial rewards from personal appearances and the sales of their discs and films.
With its mass mobilization of private cars and buses, its congestion of traffic en route, and its large-scale pollution of the environment, the Woodstock Festival mirrored and even grossly magnified the worst features of the system that many young rebels profess to reject, if not to destroy. The one positive achievement of this mass mobilization, apparently, was the warm sense of instant fellowship produced by the close physical contact of a hundred thousand bodies floating in the haze and daze of pot. Our present mass-minded, over-regimented, depersonalized culture has nothing to fear from this kind of reaction-equally regimented, equally depersonalized, equally under external control. What is this but the Negative Power Complex, attached by invisible electrodes to the same pecuniary pleasure center. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
131
" In Ahab and in his beatnik, quasi-criminal prototype, Jackson (in 'Redburn'), Melville gave expression both to the megatechnic 'Khans' of the global Pentagon and to the counter-forces they had brought into being. And the fact that Ahab's torment and hatred had gone so far that he had lost control of himself and, through his own mad reliance upon power, had become dominated completely by the creature that had disabled him, only makes Melville's story a central parable in the interpretation of modern man's destiny. In Ahab's throwing away compass and sextant at the height of the chase, Melville even anticipated the casting out of the orderly instruments of intelligence, so characteristic of the counter-culture and anti-life happenings of today. Similarly, by his maniacal concentration, Ahab rejects the inner change that might have saved the ship and the crew, when he turns a deaf ear to the pleas of love uttered by sober Starbuck in words and by Pip, a fright-shocked child and an African primitive, in dumb gesture.
Outwardly mankind is still committed tot he grim chase Melville described, lured by the adventure, the prospect of oil and whalebone, the promptings of pride, an above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power. But it has also begun consciously to face the prospect of total annihilation, which may be brought about by the captains who now have command of the ship. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
132
" Admittedly, the sciences so created were masterly symbolic fabrications: unfortunately those who utilized these symbols implicitly believed that they represented a higher order of reality, when in fact they expressed only a higher order of abstraction. Human experience itself remained, necessarily, multi-dimensional: one axis extends horizontally through the world open to external observation, the so-called objective world, and the other axis, at right angles, passes vertically through the depths and heights of the subjective world; while reality itself can only be represented by a figure composed of an indefinite number of lines drawn through both planes and intersecting at the center, in the mind of a living person. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
134
" In Ahab and in his beatnik, quasi-criminal prototype, Jackson (in 'Redburn'), Melville gave expression both to the megatechnic 'Khans' of the global Pentagon and to the counter-forces they had brought into being. And the fact that Ahab's torment and hatred had gone so far that he had lost control of himself and, through his own mad reliance upon power, had become dominated completely by the creature that had disabled him, only makes Melville's story a central parable in the interpretation of modern man's destiny. In Ahab's throwing away compass and sextant at the height of the chase, Melville even anticipated the casting out of the orderly instruments of intelligence, so characteristic of the counter-culture and anti-life happenings of today. Similarly, by his maniacal concentration, Ahab rejects the inner change that might have saved the ship and the crew, when he turns a deaf ear to the pleas of love uttered by sober Starbuck in words and by Pip, a fright-shocked child and an African primitive, in dumb gesture.
Outwardly mankind is still committed tot he grim chase Melville described, lured by the adventure, the prospect of oil and whalebone, the promptings of pride, an above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power. But it has also begun consciously to face the prospect of total annihilation, which may be brought about by the captains who now have command of the ship.
Against that senseless fate every act of rebellion, every exhibition of group defiance, every assertion of the will-to-live, every display of autonomy and self-direction, at however primitive a level, diminishes the headway of the doom-threatened ship and delays the fatal moment when the White Whale will shatter its planks and drown the crew. All the infantile, criminal, and imbecile manifestations in the arts today, everything that now expresses only murderous hatred and alienation, might still find justification if they performed their only conceivable rational function-that of awakening modern man sufficiently to his actual plight, so that he seizes the wheel and, guided by the stars, heads the ship to a friendlier shore. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
135
" Rituals of 'Counter-Culture'
The depressing monotony of megatechnic society, with its standardized environment, its standardized foods, its standardized invitations to commercialized amusement, its standardized daily routines, produces a counter-drive in over-stimulation and over-excitement in order to achieve a simulation of life. Hence 'Speed' in all its forms, from drag races to drugs. With its narcotics and hallucinogens, its electrically amplified noise and stroboscopic lights and supersonic flights from nowhere to nowhere, modern technology has helped to create a counter-culture whose very disorder serves admirably to stabilize the power system. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
136
" It was not technological insight and adroitness but cupidity, power-hunger, overweening pride, and indifference to the future that kept Western peoples from maintaining their own craft traditions and their tool-using habits. If there had been any appreciation of the immense technological treasure that was being wrecked, or of the powers of the human personality that were thus being sapped, the growing commitment to a monotechnics, based on the displacement of man, might have been publicly challenged and slowed down, or, when necessary, arrested. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
137
" The parallel between the Pyramid Age achievements and those of the Nuclear Age force themselves upon one, however reluctant one may at first be to admit them. Once again, a Divine King, embodying all the powers and prerogatives of the whole community, supported by a revered priesthood and a universal religion, that of positive science, had begun the assemblage of teh megamachine in a technologically more adequate and impressive form. If one forgets the actual part played by the King (wartime American President), by the Priesthood (secret enclave of scientists), by the vast enlargement of the bureaucracy, the military forces, and the industrial establishment, one would have no realistic conception of what actually took place. Only in terms of the Pyramid Age do all the seemingly dispersed and accidental events become polarized into an orderly constellation. The construction of the modernized totalitarian megamachine, fortified by the invention of mechanical and electronic agents that could not be fully utilized until this assemblage had taken place, proved to be Hitler's most sinister, if wholly unintended, contribution to the enslavement of mankind. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
138
" As for the debt of our present technology to primitive societies, it would remain huge if only a single contribution were taken into account: that made by the obscure tribe of Amazon Indians who had learned teh uses of their rubber plant and had produced, before the White Man encountered them, not merely rubber balls, but syringes and raincoats. No twentieth-century invention is more remarkable than this imaginative utilization of the wild rubber plant, originally limited in its botanical distribution, the modern world would possess neither natural nor artificial rubber, for which the natural gum served as a model. And without rubber, obviously all motor transport would screech to a halt. Still another contribution of 'primitive' cultures-Peruvian bark, the source of quinine-made it possible for Western man to gain a hold in the malaria-ridden areas of America, Africa, and Asia. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
