Word: mumford
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...short, McLuhanesque gloom as usual; the juggernaut future is here, so let us all lie down. But as Lewis Mumford indicates in The Pentagon of Power, what McLuhan is asking for is utter human docility. "The goal is total cultural dissolutionor what McLuhan characterizes as a 'tribal communism'McLuhan's public relations euphemism for totalitarian control." Thus Sesame Street is indeed opposed to the message, if not the medium, of the Master. The show's civilized magic and surrealism seek to increase a child's sense of himself, to dilate his imagination and his capacities...
Life in the Ruins. The biggest pyramid of all today, writes Mumford, is the welfare state, which has created a helpless, dependent populace by ministering to its every material need-a common charge. Yet it is easy to fault the welfare state now that its benefits are taken for granted. What about those outsiders-blacks, for example-who still yearn to sample its delights? Are their stomachs to be denied for the sake of their souls? Mumford is silent on the subject. It falls outside the angle of his vision. He is persuaded that the overcentralized society cannot be reformed...
...recognizes that an effort is afoot to dismantle it, led by rebellious youth. Though he approves of their yearning to reestablish contact with organic life, Mumford is too rigorous a thinker to believe that their movement offers a serious alternative to the megamachine. It is too machinelike itself, with youth running in herds that differ little from those that cram corporation offices. Theirs is not a new consciousness but a very ancient and dubious one: a primordial desire to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. But a new start, says Mumford, requires people who have digested...
...power structure by breaking down routine and defying regulations." Individuals must summon the courage to renounce the bribe of the welfare state and demand more "continent production"-in other words a slower rate of economic output, a goal now being considered for the first time by economists. Mumford hopes the new continence will slowly infiltrate and change the organs of the state just as Christianity transformed Roman society...
...Mumford's vision is as Utopian as the "higher and farther" dreams of the technocrats. True believers are free to choose between the two. More skeptical readers may feel that Mumford, over the years of piling book upon book, has created something of a pyramid himself. If the view from the top is chilly, it makes more impressive those moments when Mumford climbs down and fixes his eye on his enduring earthly dream: humanity in intimate, loving touch with nature...