Word: mumford
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PENTAGON OF POWER by Lewis Mumford. 496 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanov/ch...
...much of his career, Author-Urbanologist Lewis Mumford, now 75, has been an anachronistic voice from the age of Emerson, waspishly warning against overbearing scientists and runaway technology. Fashion has finally caught up with the man who more than a generation ago was all but alone in fighting superhighways and the spread of concrete. His latest and 24th book, The Pentagon of Power, seems remarkably fresh, as it eloquently elaborates what Mumford has been saying all along...
...Mumford betrays no I-told-you-so satisfaction that pollution, congestion and violence have borne out his dire prophecies. He is too concerned with preventing further ravages by what he refers to as the "mechanical world view," the "megamachine," "technological exhibitionism"-never, thank God, the military-industrial complex. He has nothing but contempt for scientists who dream about dashing off into space or recreating life on another planet, when they have made such a botch of this one. He quotes a mathematician defending the costly moon project: "Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon...
Obsessed by the Sun. Mumford traces the origin of such urges to the 16th century astronomer Galileo, whose unwitting crime was that he left man out of his reckoning. Preoccupied with the orderly behavior of the planets in the heavens, Galileo, and the scientists who followed him, says Mumford, assumed that life on earth could be reduced to neat, predictable patterns. With his customary prophetic fervor, Mumford accuses Galileo of "driving man out of living nature into a cosmic desert even more peremptorily than Jehovah drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden...
...fervent science of Galileo and his followers, says Mumford, was in part a revival of the sun worship of the ancient Egyptians. Other Egyptian parallels strike Mumford's fancy. Just as the Egyptians erected vast sterile pyramids at great cost, so did the industrial age begin to mass-produce valueless goods. A far-fetched analogy? Mumford finds pyramids lurking everywhere in modern life. He includes an illustration of a supercity proposed by Buckminster Fuller that looks like a pyramid but lacks any perceptible improvement in living conditions. Even the manned space capsule "corresponds exactly to the innermost chamber...