Lewis Mumford

He uses his own refrigerator as an example, reporting that it "has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job. Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value. ... [O]ne can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use."

Biotechnics

Mumford was deeply concerned with the relationship between techniques and bioviability. The latter term, not used by Mumford, characterizes an area's capability to support life. Before the advent of technology, most areas of the planet were bioviable at some level or other; however, where certain forms of technology advance rapidly, bioviability decreases dramatically. Slag heaps, poisoned waters, parking lots, and concrete cities, for example, are extremely limited in terms of their bioviability. Non-bioviable regions are common in cinema in the form of dystopias (e.g., Blade Runner). Mumford did not believe it was necessary for bioviability to collapse as technology advanced, however, because he held it was possible to create technologies that functioned in an ecologically responsible manner, and he called that sort of technology biotechnics.^[14] Mumford believed that biotechnic consciousness (and possibly even community) was emerging as a later stage in the evolution of Darwinian thinking about the nature of human life. He believed this was the sort of technology needed to shake off the suicidal drive of "megatechnics." While Mumford recognized an ecological consciousness that traces back to the earliest communities, he regarded emerging biotechnics as a product of neo-Darwinian consciousness, as a post-industrial form of thinking, one that refuses to look away from the mutually-influencing relationship between the state of the living organism and the state of its environment. In Mumford's mind, the society organized around biotechnics would restrain its technology for the sake of that integral relationship.

In Mumford's understanding, the various technologies that arose in the megatechnic context have brought unintended and harmful side effects along with the obvious benefits they have bequeathed to us. He points out, for example, that the development of money (as a technology) created, as a side effect, a context for irrational accumulation of excess because it eliminated the burdensome aspects of object-wealth by making wealth abstract. In those eras when wealth was not abstract, plenitude had functioned as the organizing principle around its acquisition (i.e., wealth, measured in grains, lands, animals, to the point that one is satisfied, but not saddled with it). Money, which allows wealth to be conceived as pure quantity instead of quality, is an example of megatechnics, one which can spiral out of control. If Mumford is right in this conceptualization, historians and economists should be able to trace a relationship between the still-increasing abstraction of wealth and radical transformations with respect to wealth's distribution and role. And, indeed, it does appear that, alongside its many benefits, the movement toward electronic money has stimulated forms of economic stress and exploitation not yet fully understood and not yet come to their conclusion. A technology for distributing resources that was less given to abstract hoarding would be more suitable to a biotechnic conception of living.

Thus Mumford argued that the biotechnic society would not hold to the megatechnic delusion that technology must expand unceasingly, magnifying its own power and would shatter that delusion in order to create and preserve "livability." Rather than the megatechnic pursuit of power, the biotechnic society would pursue what Mumford calls "plenitude"; that is, a homeostatic relationship between resources and needs. This notion of plenitude becomes clearer if we suggest that the biotechnic society would relate to its technology in the manner an animal relates to available food–under circumstances of natural satisfaction, the pursuit of technological advance would not simply continue "for its own sake."

Alongside the limiting effect of satisfaction amidst plenitude, the pursuit of technological advance would also be limited by its potentially negative effects upon the organism. Thus, in a biotechnic society, the quality of air, the quality of food, the quality of water, these would all be significant concerns that could limit any technological ambitions threatening to them. The anticipated negative value of noise, radiation, smog, noxious chemicals, and other technical by-products would significantly constrain the introduction of new technical innovation. In Mumford's words, a biotechnic society would direct itself toward "qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, and freedom from quantitative pressures and crowding. Self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair." The biotechnic society would pursue balance, wholeness, and completeness; and this is what those individuals in pursuit of biotechnics would do as well.

Mumford's critique of the city and his vision of cities that are organized around the nature of human bodies, so essential to all Mumford's work on city life and urban design, is rooted in an incipient notion of biotechnics: "livability," a notion which Mumford got from his mentor, Patrick Geddes.

Mumford used the term biotechnics in the later sections of The Pentagon of Power, written in 1970. The term sits well alongside his early characterization of "organic humanism," in that biotechnics represent the concrete form of technique that appeals to an organic humanist. When Mumford described biotechnics, automotive and industrial pollution had become dominant technological concerns, along with the fear of nuclear annihilation. Mumford recognized, however, that technology had even earlier produced a plethora of hazards, and that it would do so into the future. For Mumford, human hazards are rooted in a power-oriented technology that does not adequately respect and accommodate the essential nature of humanity. Mumford is stating implicitly, as others would later state explicitly, that contemporary human life understood in its ecological sense is out of balance because the technical parts of its ecology (guns, bombs, cars, drugs) have spiraled out of control, driven by forces peculiar to them rather than constrained by the needs of the species that created them. He believed that biotechnics was the emerging answer and the only hope that could be set out against the problem of megatechnics. It was an answer, he believed, that was already beginning to assert itself in his time.

It is true that Mumford's writing privileges the term "biotechnics" more than the "biotechnic society." The reason is clear in the last sentence of The Pentagon of Power where he writes, "for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out." Mumford believed that the biotechnic society was a desideratum—one that should guide his contemporaries as they walked out the doors of their megatechnic confines (he also calls them "coffins"). Thus he ends his narrative, as he well understood, at the beginning of another one: the possible revolution that gives rise to a biotechnic society, a quiet revolution, for Mumford, one that would arise from the biotechnic consciousness and actions of individuals. Mumford was an avid reader of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of the organism.^[15]

Polytechnics versus monotechnics

A key idea, introduced in Technics and Civilization (1934) was that technology was twofold:

• Polytechnic, which enlists many different modes of technology, providing a complex framework to solve human problems.
• Monotechnic, which is technology only for its own sake, which oppresses humanity as it moves along its own trajectory.

Mumford commonly criticized modern America's transportation networks as being "monotechnic" in their reliance on cars.

Three epochs of civilization

Also discussed at length in

(following concepts originated by Patrick Geddes):

• Eotechnic (the Middle Ages)
• Paleotechnic (the time of the Industrial Revolution) and
• Neotechnic (later, present-day)

Megamachines

Mumford also refers to large

World Wars

are prior examples.

He explains that meticulous attention to accounting and standardization, and elevation of military leaders to divine status, are spontaneous features of megamachines throughout history. He cites such examples as the repetitive nature of Egyptian paintings which feature enlarged pharaohs and public display of enlarged portraits of Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. He also cites the overwhelming prevalence of quantitative accounting records among surviving historical fragments, from ancient Egypt to Nazi Germany.

Necessary to the construction of these megamachines is an enormous bureaucracy of humans which act as "servo-units", working without ethical involvement. According to Mumford, technological improvements such as the assembly line, or instant, global, wireless, communication and remote control, can easily weaken the perennial psychological barriers to certain types of questionable actions. An example which he uses is that of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized logistics in support of the Holocaust. Mumford collectively refers to people willing to carry out placidly the extreme goals of these megamachines as "Eichmanns".

The clock as herald of the Industrial Revolution

One of the better-known studies of Mumford is of the way the mechanical clock was developed by monks in the Middle Ages and subsequently adopted by the rest of society. He viewed this device as the key invention of the whole Industrial Revolution, contrary to the common view of the steam engine holding the prime position, writing: "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. ... The clock ... is a piece of power-machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes ...."^[16]

Urban civilization

pessimistic in tone, Mumford argues that urban planning

should emphasize an 'organic' relationship between people and their living spaces.

Mumford uses the example of the medieval city as the basis for the "ideal city," and claims that the modern city is too close to the Roman city (the sprawling megalopolis) which ended in collapse; if the modern city carries on in the same vein, Mumford argues, then it will meet the same fate as the Roman city.

Mumford wrote critically of urban culture believing the city is "a product of earth ... a fact of nature ... man's method of expression."^[17] Further, Mumford recognized the crises facing urban culture, distrustful of the growing finance industry, political structures, fearful that a local community culture was not being fostered by these institutions. Mumford feared "metropolitan finance," urbanization, politics, and alienation. Mumford wrote: "The physical design of cities and their economic functions are secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community."^[18]

Suburbs

Suburbia did not escape Mumford's criticism either:

In the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion. Here domesticity could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond. This was not merely a child-centered environment; it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.^[19]

Religion and spirituality

Mumford is also among the first urban planning scholars who paid serious attention to religion in the planning field.^[20][21] In one of his least well-known books, Faith for Living (1940), Mumford argues that:

The segregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence.^[22]: 216

Influence

Mumford's interest in the history of technology and his explanation of "polytechnics", along with his general philosophical bent, has been an important influence on a number of more recent thinkers concerned that technology serve human beings as broadly and well as possible. Some of these authors—such as

J. Baldwin, E. F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Murray Bookchin, Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, Colin Ward^[24] and Kevin Carson

—have been intellectuals and persons directly involved with technological development and decisions about the use of technology.

Mumford also had an influence on the American environmental movement, with thinkers like Barry Commoner and Bookchin being influenced by his ideas on cities, ecology and technology.^[25] Ramachandra Guha noted his work contains "some of the earliest and finest thinking on bioregionalism, anti-nuclearism, biodiversity, alternate energy paths, ecological urban planning and appropriate technology."^[26]

Mumford's influence is also evident in the work of some artists including Berenice Abbott's photographs of New York City in the late 1930s.^[27]

Mumford was an inspiration for

Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943).^[28]

Works

See also: Category:Books by Lewis Mumford

• 1922  The Story of Utopias^[29]
• 1924  Sticks and Stones
• 1926  Architecture, published by the American Library Association in its "Reading With a Purpose" series
• 1926  The Golden Day
• 1929  Herman Melville
• 1931  The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895
• "Renewal of Life" series
  • 1934  Technics and Civilization
  • 1938  The Culture of Cities
  • 1944  The Condition of Man
  • 1951  The Conduct of Life
• 1939  Men Must Act
• 1940  Faith for Living
• 1941  The South in Architecture
• 1945  City Development
• 1946  Values for Survival
• 1952  Art and Technics
• 1952  Roots of Contemporary American Architecture
• 1954  In the Name of Sanity
• 1956  From the Ground Up (essay collection)
• 1956  The Transformations of Man (New York: Harper and Row)
• 1961  The City in History (awarded the National Book Award)
• 1963  The Highway and the City (essay collection)
• The Myth of the Machine (two volumes)
  • 1967  Technics and Human Development
  • 1970  The Pentagon of Power
• 1968  The Urban Prospect (essay collection)
• 1979  My Work and Days: A Personal Chronicle
• 1982  Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford (New York: Dial Press)
• 1986  The Lewis Mumford Reader (Donald L. Miller, ed.; New York: Pantheon Books)

Films

• 1939  The City

Articles

• "The quick and the dead". The Sky Line. The New Yorker. Vol. 24, no. 46. January 8, 1949. pp. 60–65.^[30]
• "Civic virtue". The Sky Line. The New Yorker. Vol. 25, no. 50. February 4, 1950. pp. 58–63.^[31]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i} "Chronology of Mumford's Life". Lewis Mumford Center. Retrieved October 12, 2010.
2. ISBN 9780415252256
   .
3. ^ Wojtowicz, Robert (January 2001). "City As Community: The Life And Vision Of Lewis Mumford". Quest. 4 (1). Old Dominion University. Archived from the original on October 9, 2007. Retrieved October 31, 2007.
4. ^ Sorensen, Lee (ed.). "Mumford, Lewis". Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved October 12, 2010.
5. ^
   ISBN 9781316766965
   .
6. ISBN 9780802139344
   .
7. ISBN 9780815631132
   .
8. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved April 24, 2023.
9. ^ "Lewis Mumford". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. February 9, 2023. Retrieved April 24, 2023.
10. ^ "Awards". The College Art Association. Retrieved October 11, 2010.
11. ^ ^{a b} "National Book Awards – 1962". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 19, 2012.
12. ^ New York Times May 2, 1997
13. ^ Mumford, Lewis (1974). "Enough Energy for Life & The Next Transformation of Man [MIT lecture transcript]". CoEvolution Quarterly. 1 (4). Sausalito, CA: POINT Foundation: 19–23.
14. ^ The Pentagon of Power p.395
15. ^ E.g., he published a critical review of Process and Reality: "Metaphysics and Art. Review of Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, by Alfred North Whitehead; Essays in Philosophy, edited by Thomas Vernor Smith and William Kelley Wright; The Philosophic Way of Life, by T.V. Smith." The New Republic, December 18, 1929: 117–118, reprinted in Alan Van Wyk and Michel Weber (eds.), Creativity and Its Discontents. The Response to Whitehead's Process and Reality, Frankfurt / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2009, pp. 13–17.
16. ^ Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. London: Routledge, 1934. pp. 14–15.
17. ^ Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 1938
18. ^ City Reader edited by Richard T. LeGates, Frederic Stout, p.91
19. ISBN 0-19-504983-7
    , pp.155–156
20. S2CID 149473348
    .
21. S2CID 143540226
    .
22. OCLC 246342365
    .
23. ^ Gregg, Richard. The Value of Voluntary Simplicity. Pendle Hill, 1936, p. 32.
24. ^ Ward, Colin. Influences: Voices of Creative Dissent. Green Books, 1991, pp. 106–07.
25. ^ Wall, Derek. Green History, Routledge, 1994, pg. 91.
26. ^ Quoted in Guha, Ramachandra & Martinez-Alier, J. (1997) Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan (1997). For other works on Mumford's ecological and environmental thought, see: David Pepper Modern Environmentalism, Routledge, 1996; Max Nicolson, The New Environmental Age, Cambridge University Press, 1989; and BA Minteer, The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America MIT Press, 2006.
27. ^ Barr, Peter. "Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott's Photographs, 1925–1939," PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1997.
28. ^ Olson, Walter (1998). "The Writerly Rand", Reason, October 1998
29. ^ "The Story of Utopias Index". Sacred-texts.com. Retrieved November 10, 2013.
30. ^ Reviews the Esso Building, Rockefeller Center.
31. Parke-Bernet Galleries, Madison Avenue
    .

Further reading

• Blake, Casey Nelson (1990). Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  ISBN 0-8078-1935-2
  .
• Hughes, Thomas P.; Hughes, Agatha C., eds. (1990). Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. New York:
  ISBN 978-0-19-506173-4
  .
• Lasch, Christopher (Summer 1980). "Lewis Mumford and the Myth of the Machine". Salmagundi. No. 49. pp. 3–28.
  JSTOR 40547360
  .
• Miller, Donald L. (1989). Lewis Mumford: A Life. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  ISBN 9781555842444
  .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Lewis Mumford.

• Lewis Mumford: A Brief Biography
• Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the
  University at Albany, The State University of New York
• Virtual Lewis Mumford Library- Mumford Archive at Monmouth University
• Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts
• Works by Lewis Mumford at Open Library
• Lewis Mumford papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania