Word: human
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scientists were carving up the urban field into fiefdoms--sociology, education, economics, politics--Mumford insisted on considering all the approaches together, and pioneered the study of man's "total" urban environment. Mumford became interested in the cities because he thought they were being ruined by a dangerous trend in human affairs: he uncontrolled spread of technology. In the Culture of the Cities, he cautioned that man had better make room for human beings in the city, and make himself the master of his machines...
...watched slum multiply on slum around his birthplace in New York City, he concluded that throughout all of history there have been two types of technologies. One of these he calls the democratic technology, in which the "symbolic" pursuits of men--the arts, music, poetry, human communication--have been ultimate ends toward which man's work and his tools contributed...
...other he labels the authoritarian technology. In less developed civilizations, authoritarian technologies consisted of men organized as human machines to produce for kings and priests. Today, he warns, we are on the threshold of a new king of authoritarian technology: "The center of authority in this new system," he wrote in "Now Let Man Take Over," "is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent...
Mumford considers the McCarthy movement and the revolt in the Universities proofs of his hypotheses and signs of hope. The first, he feels, was an effort to recapture for human beings a system that has become increasingly inward-looking--taking orders from its computers and social scientists instead of its subjects. The University upheaval he sees as a healthy effort to restore the University to its rightful place as detached critic of the system instead of participant in its oppression of human life. "Everytime a professor goes to the Pentagon he is binding the University that much closer...
Mumford cites several elements of human experience which young people today ignore or consider irrelevant. One is the relation of rural and urban areas. Mumford can still recall the time when a dime and the subway put you in unspoiled country-side outside New York City; and he maintains doggedly that recapturing the rural experience is essential to the "renewal of life" which he envisions for this country. To this end, he envisions an ideal pattern for future societies: a polynuclear, regional development of moderate size cities, each surrounded by green belts devoted only to agriculture. The central core would...