Word: mumford
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...Tomorrow? THE CONDUCT OF LIFE (342 pp.)- Lewis Mumford-Harcourt, Brace...
...Lewis Mumford's new book is the crown of 20 years' hard labor, the last volume of a tetralogy that includes Technics and Civilization (1934), The Culture of Cities (1938), and The Condition of Man (1944). In these, Mumford plotted directions for the development of the machine, the city, and society. In The Conduct of Life he undertakes the more ambitious task of creating human beings fit to live in the structures of Volumes...
...Mumford sees him, contemporary man is about as well suited to a place in the Mumford futurama as a Rhode Island rooster is suited to cooing like a dove and soaring like an eagle. Modern man has but one real belief: "Modern man can do no wrong." He regards all strong emotions (with the exception of violence) as "hysterical or funny." The "morality of the 'dead-pan'" is so exclusively his basic morality that by the time he reaches college he has one chance in three of being a "moral imbecile." He is "too numb even to hate...
...such passages Author-Mumford reveals himself as a familiar type of preacher. The difference between Preacher Mumford and others is the passionate effort he makes to translate a host of old truths into a single new creed...
...teacher for guidance. "The task of the individual Messiah . . . now devolves equally on all men"; tomorrow's model society must be a universal democracy of self-teachers. Candidates must begin not by enlisting in a party or signing a pledge, but by withdrawing into self-analysis and contemplation. Mumford realizes that a man can't just throw up his job and become a hermit, but he can "escape from [the] time cage" by cutting down on the nonessentials that prevent concentration. "No house in the future will be generously planned," says he, "that does not have its closet...