Word: mumford
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus Culture Critic Lewis Mumford (The City in History, The Highway and the City) decides that present ideas of man's inevitable dependence on science and technology are nonsense. Modern man, he says, is a victim of a "radical misinterpretation" of human development. Furthermore, the machine will either turn him into a collectivized, automatic non-person or blow him back to the jungle. The Myth of the Machine is hybrid literature-part history, part anthropology, part poetry. It is a violent, splenetic attack on much that has happened in civilization for the past several millennia, and it occasionally approaches...
...Beginning the Word. Currently accepted theory, says Mumford, suggests that man has moved logically from the primeval invention of tools to conquest of nature and finally to detachment from organic habitat by means of ultra-machines. With support from a big-think bibliography of 370 sources, Mumford argues that making and using tools didn't signal man's rise from slime. Dreams, language, ritual-all first products of the mind-did. And because the mind is father to the hand, it can reverse the mechanized march to doom. How that might happen will have to wait until Mumford...
Already anthropologists have attacked Mumford as an armchair expert and dismissed his notions on the origins of speech as unknowable. He says language comes from dreams. "Before man achieved speech, his own unconscious alone must have been the only impelling voice he recognized, speaking to him in its own teasingly contradictory and confused images. Only a kind of dull doggedness can perhaps account for man's ability to get the better of these treacherous gifts and make something of them," and only by command of language was man able to embrace technics and articulate the significance of his achievements...
...Great Container. Primitive rituals, continues Mumford, were "basic to the whole development of human culture"; they stabilized Paleolithic man through repetitive acts that produced predictable effects. Early man was first a collector and later a hunter; from animals he learned how to gather food before discovering how to kill for it. Kings created the prototype machines from people: they organized manpower to build monuments and wage...
...often Mumford sounds like a narrow literary intellectual, or he ignores obvious holes in his theories. It is provincial today to say "language is the great container of culture." What about other forms of communication-music? painting? mathematics? Mumford describes kings as the first technological totalitarians-but tends to forget that kings could rule only from bases of commonly held beliefs and aspirations. How does Mumford know that "mil lennia passed [after Paleolithic man] before man would take the life of his own kind in cold blood...