Word: mumford
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Only now are we beginning to see the implications of the insight Mumford had 30 years ago. It now appears that the Victorians are not Mumford and his following but the defenders of unhindered technology and its corporate and military offspring in this country. In any case, Mumford has now picked up allies both in the establishment--mayors who are fighting pollution and Galbraith who warns of corporate control in the New Industrial State--and on the Left...
...UNWITTING alliance between Mumford and student radicals seems particularly unlikely, but fits into the pattern of Mumford's blend of eras. Mumford, the crusty scholar born in 1895, considers it a stroke of luck that he waited until the student revolt had matured to start writing his twenty-fourth volume, the second part of The Myth of the Machine (the first part appeared last year). "I'm entirely sympathetic with the students," he says bluntly. "Everything they're asking is long over...
...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 was among the first scholars in the United States to speak out against the war in Vietnam. He wrote Johnson an open letter condemning the escalation of the war two days after Johnson started bombing the North in February, 1965. Then, in May, 1965, in his last speech as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he again struck out against Johnson's policies on the war. "I was doing something that was reprehensible in a conventional sense," he recalls, "but I felt the issue had to be thrust forward." For his efforts, he was physically threatened...
...WHILE THERE are great areas of overlap between Mumford's cause and the New Left's, there are important differences as well. To a large degree they are differences of style and experience, but precisely for that reason they are revealing of Mumford himself. Mumford is highly critical of the young for their arrogance in ignoring history. The impatience of the young, he feels, is just another manifestation of push-button mentality, which expects rewards in seconds. "Change," says Mumford, "takes experiment. It can't come overnight. This is the one thing I'm against." History teaches this lesson...