I’ve come to appreciate every word he says, enormously. And it never stops surprising me, his broad insight, his deep understanding of historical forces. What he said about a future subjective age, and the vitalism before WWI is extraordinary. It reverberates with so many ideas buried in the past. Not to mention this passage:
“A society that lives not by its men but by its institutions, is not a collective soul, but a machine.”
In relation to that, the failure he refers to at the beginning of the text is only partially man’s own making. The “megamachine”, the “mechanical order”, that humanity perfected long time ago and put into motion acquired a soul of its own. When people talk about some dystopian future inhabited by automated organisms, or the abhorred enslavement of the masses exerted by some primitive megalomaniac king, as if they were two extremes on a distant and impossible line: we are that future already, we have always been that past.
“To understand the point of the machine's origin and its line of descent is to have a fresh insight into both the origins of our present over mechanized culture and the fate and destiny of modern man. We shall find that the original myth of the machine projected the extravagant hopes and wishes that have come to abundant fulfillment in our own age. Yet at the same time it imposed restrictions, abstentions, and compulsions and servilities that, both directly and as a result of the counter-reactions they produced, today threaten even more mischievous consequences than they did in the Pyramid Age. We shall see, finally, that from the outset all the blessings of mechanized production have been undermined by the process of mass destruction which the megamachine made possible.” (Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. I, 9, p.189. 1962)
Everything that is, is as object. I have only two objections against this, the most extraordinary of modern views: You are not an object, you are all that is.
I’ve come to appreciate every word he says, enormously. And it never stops surprising me, his broad insight, his deep understanding of historical forces. What he said about a future subjective age, and the vitalism before WWI is extraordinary. It reverberates with so many ideas buried in the past. Not to mention this passage:
“A society that lives not by its men but by its institutions, is not a collective soul, but a machine.”
In relation to that, the failure he refers to at the beginning of the text is only partially man’s own making. The “megamachine”, the “mechanical order”, that humanity perfected long time ago and put into motion acquired a soul of its own. When people talk about some dystopian future inhabited by automated organisms, or the abhorred enslavement of the masses exerted by some primitive megalomaniac king, as if they were two extremes on a distant and impossible line: we are that future already, we have always been that past.
“To understand the point of the machine's origin and its line of descent is to have a fresh insight into both the origins of our present over mechanized culture and the fate and destiny of modern man. We shall find that the original myth of the machine projected the extravagant hopes and wishes that have come to abundant fulfillment in our own age. Yet at the same time it imposed restrictions, abstentions, and compulsions and servilities that, both directly and as a result of the counter-reactions they produced, today threaten even more mischievous consequences than they did in the Pyramid Age. We shall see, finally, that from the outset all the blessings of mechanized production have been undermined by the process of mass destruction which the megamachine made possible.” (Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. I, 9, p.189. 1962)
Everything that is, is as object. I have only two objections against this, the most extraordinary of modern views: You are not an object, you are all that is.