Word: mumford
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Betrayal and Fulfillment. One of the rules Author Mumford learned from Sir Patrick Geddes was that man should lead a "balanced life." A balanced life consists in using every element in man to the full - but not to excess. Human history, according to Author Mumford, is the record of such attempts at balance...
History's most balanced lives, Author Mumford believes, were led by the Greeks. The great Greeks were men of action as well as thinkers. But ironically, says Author Mumford, their very sense of wholeness was the Greeks' undoing. Athenians began to see life not as a "spiral of change and development," but as a "superbly closed circle"-"life arrested meant art perfected." When mortal danger threatened them, in the form of Alexander the Great, the Greeks could not summon themselves to the excess of battle...
Devils of Neurosis. The second great attempt at human balance came from the teachings of Jesus, which Author Mumford explains with a little help from Sigmund Freud. To a Roman world ridden with war, poverty and the brutality of the arena, Jesus "sought to bring the inner and outer aspects of the personality into balance by throwing off compulsions, constraints, automatisms." "No one else had spoken of the moral life with fewer negations or with so many positive expressions of power and joy." To Author Mumford, Jesus' healings of the sick are no miracles but works of "psychotherapy...
Jesus' chief failing as a great man, says Mumford, was his "indifference" to art, philosophy, science and "political improvement." But Jesus is "hardly responsible," Author Mumford believes, for the "little men who guarded Jesus' memory, took him, drained off the precious life blood of his spirit, mummified his body . . . and over his remains . . . proceeded to erect . . . the Christian Church...
Though Author Mumford examines the ideas and behavior of medieval men at exhaustive length, he concludes that, since Jesus' time, the prevailing condition of man has been chiefly the ups & downs of imbalance. Man has spoiled even his best ideas by excess or by clinging to them long after they were dated. Thus...