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141 " Perhaps this sacrifice has been more willingly made because the 'conquest of space' has proved, if temporarily, the only substitute yet available for harnessing the immense consumptive needs and destructive powers of the megamachine, without actually bringing about the catastrophic end of that machine itself in collective deeds of calculated genocide, which would defoliate the planet and exfoliate the human race. The rivalry between the Russian and the American megamachines, in their race to land on the moon or explore the nearer planets, might thus be considered a sophisticated though superstitious substitute for William James' "moral equivalent of war." But since such space rivalry leaves all the present weapons for annihilating mankind in existence, and in fact increases their lethal potentialities,t his form of collective competition holds forth no better promise of ensuring permanent comity than do those international soccer matches which so frequently end in demonstrations of more intense hostility and outright violence. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
142 " Unlike any earthbound activity, space exploration is limitless, and the technological demands it makes are insatiable. In this sense, spatial adventurism has indeed the sinister advantages of war: all the more effectively because it recovers for popular consumption the archaic sentiments that originally led to the New World exploration of the sixteenth century and later. "
143 " The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious or fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principles of the power complex. "
144 " The state, the official religion, the bureaucracy, the army, these resurgent institutions of civilization were capable indeed of effecting great constructive transformations of the environment, but the human price of their success was heavy: the class structure, the lifetime fixation of function, the monopoly of land and economic and educational opportunity, the inequalities of property and privilege, the chronic savagery of slavery and war, the fears and obsessions and paranoid ambitions of the ruling classes, culminating in mass destructions and exterminations. In short, a nightmare. Such constant miscarriages of power and organization offset the genuine claims that could be made for this system, and raised serious questions, at least in the minds of the oppressed and the enslaved, about the value of civilization itself. These doubts encouraged the notion that if only the past institutions and structures of civilization were destroyed, men would be happy, virtuous, and free. Rousseau expressed this idea in its most extreme form in his prize essay for the Academy at Dijon, in which he castigated the demoralizing effects of the arts and sciences, those features of civilization about which people had the fewest doubts. "