Logo DBNL
On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

14. Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford was born in 1895 in Flushing, New York. He studied education at City College of New York and at Columbia University.
Among his best-known works are The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development, Vol. I (1967), The Pentagon of Power, Vol. II (1970).
In 1972 Mumford received the National Medal for literature.

When John Glenn came back to earth, he said: ‘Let man take over.’ Limits to Growth advocates just that.

 

This has probably been part of my thinking from the very beginning.

In 1938, when I published The Culture of Cities, I took for granted that the population statistics at that time would continue. The leading West European countries were losing their old rate of growth, except for Holland. The other countries were all looking forward to having a balanced population by 1970 or 1980 at the latest, so Limits to Growth is no fresh idea to me. I felt that this was the very basis of the laying of the foundations of a new kind of civilization. For a century and a half we have relied on population growth to ensure industrial expansion and financial gain. We have been overpressed into doing everything too fast and quantitively too great.

 

But if this was your opinion in '38, how much progress do you think man has made over the past half-century in achieving this goal of a more managed industrial growth and population growth?

 

Insofar as the knowledge of contraceptives has been spreading, great progress has been made. This began first in France, because even the peasants in France knew how to use contraceptives during the nineteenth century. They learned from the upper classes how to limit their population. France had almost reached stability before the second world war. But just the opposite has happened with industrial growth. War and waste on an unparalleled scale have overstimulated this kind of growth.

Don't you think that the explosion of population about three percent in Venezuela, et cetera, needs a World Population Council, a management, to make the planet livable towards the year 2000?

 

That is only a paper solution. The real question is, how much can be done by education within the time allotted us. You cannot control the sexual life of simple people merely by passing laws and police inspection. There has to be some other way of doing it. In the past this has usually been done by religion. Now we have no such control. That control grows weaker and weaker as time goes on. Our task is to appeal to the great masses of people on the basis of something that concerns them as much as making love and having children. It's hard to give a simple answer to this question, except in the general terms of a better all-round life.

 

Could you tell us what your basic concept is of what you call the ‘pentagon of power.’

The basis of the ‘pentagon of power’ is an unqualified commitment to power, money, and pleasure. All natural wants have limits that are soon reached. But there is no natural limit to the acquisition of power or money, whether or not any sensible social or personal use is made of it. Money plays a psychological role in modern society that is strangely like that of the recently discovered pleasure-center in the brain. A monkey with an electrode attached to his pleasure-center forgets all other life needs, even to the point of starvation, in order to prolong and intensify this pleasurable stimulus. So with our present drives to increase physical energy, political control, military power and personal power in the form of status, privilege, fame, publicity - all translatable into the abstract symbols of money. For this reason all over the world the environment is being mined, bulldozed and wrecked ‘for pleasure,’ that is money.

There are various things involved. First of all is energy itself. That is power in the fundamental sense. It's basic to all society. We're not going to do away with this basis, but we can do away with the notion that this is the only important factor in human society. The expansion of power is not the chief business of man. He needs the right quantity of power at the right place at the right time, and therefore he must have the ability to increase it or diminish it in accordance with his needs.

The myth of power has dominated all large-scale societies for five thousand years. Every nation thinks of its life in terms of increasing its power, that's to say increasing its ability to fight and overcome and exploit other nations. This is an irrational factor, obviously. Then the other part of the ‘pentagon of power’ is the overwhelming need for inflating the organs of publicity. We do it now through radio, television and advertising. More and more of our life is spent for the sake of gaining the attention of other men through publicity. This was once the great prerogative of kings. Their palaces and monuments were advertising devices, to show how powerful they were. If you are a president or a dictator, a bandleader or a television star your image appears every day in every place because of the fact we now have worldwide communication. The common man has fallen for this as well. Crimes are undoubtedly being committed by people who merely want to get attention for themselves -

 

- Like Oswald1 and Bremer?2

 

- right down to the latest fanatic who has killed somebody just to

get into the newspapers, even if he's going to be caught and executed.

 

You speak a great deal of the electronic phantasmagoria of Marshall McLuhan,3 who thinks that ‘we are electronically inducing mass psychosis.’ You don't agree with McLuhan?

 

I disagree with his notion that we should submit to these things. He's a very erratic thinker, so he contradicts himself frequently. I haven't attempted to catch up with the latest McLuhan. But the McLuhan I am familiar with - and I've been familiar with him for a long time - is the McLuhan who felt that man's real life now lies outside him, in the machines that he has projected and that he should submit to this, that he should regard this as his destiny. I take just the opposite point of view.

 

You accord an entirely different importance to the individuality of man then.

 

I think the most important part of man's nature, the fundamental fact about all living organisms is that they are autonomous, they are self-governing, they have their own method of growth, they have their own relationship to the environment, their life springs from within, not just from outside. It is of course affected by all that lies outside, but there's something within every organism that makes it true to itself. On my reading of what's happening we have more and more transferred our own vital activities to various pseudo-organic machines, who can perform them more efficiently but always under somebody else's control, not under our control.

 

Including television?

 

Including television, surely.

 

But you would not deny the disastrous influence on masses of people - and children - being glued day in, day out to television and being offered too often plain garbage.

 

Yes, it's a kind of suicide, this being committed to the pseudolife of mass organizations - daily suicide. Under the command of television you surrender your life to this or that organization. Then you find your life

has become emptier and emptier. Without the stimulus of drugs in one form or another. And television is just the cheapest and most common drug; without this mind-killer you cannot bear life. Beneath this there's a very deep tendency to commit suicide, to abandon the effort to develop, to say that all life is worthless. That's what the whole avant-garde is now saying to us, both in literature and in painting.

 

Disoriented society. How to pull out of this maelstrom?

 

Well, the answer is that there are large numbers of healthy people still at work in it who are oriented towards life. Every time a new baby is born we have somebody who is potentially oriented to life. I can see a change already taking place. Two things are happening at the same time: One is negative, a surrender of all the traditional life-making habits and institutions to the great bureaucratic and military organizations that control our life, the ‘pentagon of power.’ On the other hand, among many of the young there is an attempt to resume autonomy, to think for themselves, to act for themselves. They do this very crudely and childishly because they are thinking about a very narrow self; they are thinking in terms of the pathetic five-year culture that they're familiar with. They don't realize that they couldn't think at all unless they were thinking with a Paleolithic invention called language, which is at least fifty thousand years old and probably much more than that. In other words, they're trying to leave the past behind, and on those terms they can have no future. Real life always involves keeping the past and future working together, within the mind. The past cannot be denied or totally effaced any more than the genes. The past exists in our genes. We cannot wipe out our genes. They're there with us for good and bad, and that's true of history as well.

 

Mr. Mumford, you don't believe in this notion of a global village?

 

Yes and no. Long before McLuhan, I said that for certain purposes ‘the whole planet is a city.’4 Not a village, but a city, a vehicle for the highest and widest forms of communication. But open only to a highly cultivated and disciplined minority, today represented largely by scientists. Just the opposite of the limited village. You cannot communicate with anybody whose language you don't speak. You cannot even do that by images, because shaking the head from left to right means yes in Turkish and up and down means yes in most European cultures.

Only for certain narrow purposes could we have a global village. The richness of life has never been encompassed by a village. Indeed, a global village would constitute a very primitive and a very elementary culture, lacking human qualities that even the most primitive village possesses.

 

You often discuss Toynbee5 and you speak of the process of dematerialization, parallel to Limits to Growth, to improving the quality of life at the cost of this mad race for material gain or of power.6 What is your concept of dematerialization and how is that to be achieved?

 

Well, it is a matter of limiting the demand for goods to the necessary amount, not to the amount that gives you status, not to the amount that gives you profit or power, but to the necessary amount in terms of life. I can give you a very simple illustration from what goes on in any American suburb. Most suburbanites measure their prosperity by the size of their lawns. If they can acquire as much as an acre, they spend eight hours every week going back and forth on their kiddycars mowing this lawn. Just a grass wasteland. We have the same amount of space here. Instead of a wide lawn, I have reduced it to the smallest possible amount, I can mow that land with a hand mower in an hour and a quarter. Actually I can run this entire acre and keep it order without outside help. We have various kinds of raspberry bushes and currant bushes and an asparagus bed and a vegetable garden. In other words, we can enjoy all the richness of this environment through spending the same number of hours that the suburbanite spends on keeping his lawn in order. In that sense he belongs to the power culture. His lawn gives him status. He does not have a single useful thing growing there, whereas I belong to the human culture, which enjoys an enormous amount of variety and which does not involve more work. The suburbanite has to use up oil and gas in order to keep his lawn going. I only have to use up the sun's energy through food. This is one way to answer the problem of what are we going to do about the demand for energy. The answer is you can reduce the demand for energy by the right kind of planning. I don't require extra gasoline to do any of the operations here.

 

You speak of a vast amount of valuable knowledge becoming relegated to a mountainous rubbish heap, and you mention an overproduction of books.7

 

This is a mental pollution, of course, and we should have been aware of this a long time ago. We have invented a system which demands

greater and greater growth in every department that promises profit. We talk about the gross national product and the necessity for increasing that every year. This goes on in every field, and plainly it goes on in the production of books. If you don't produce books and papers, you cannot get promotion in a university.

 

That is overkill.

 

Of course it's overkill. It's overkill of the mind as well, because nobody in another fifty years will be able to find his way among this mountain of books.

 

Limits to Growth used computers. Would you say computers are socially disruptive?

 

None of our inventions is by itself socially disruptive. It's the absurd use we make of them that's disruptive. The superstitious notion today is that if you feed certain data to a computer and the computer gives you an answer, that answer acquires a godlike authority, which the same knowledge did not have when it came directly from a human being. This is the kind of machine worship which I regard as a new form of idolatry, a mating of the Mechanical Calf with the Golden Calf.

 

You call automation a self-inflicted impotence.

 

Yes, because we surrender the most precious power of all, the power of using all the attributes of mind, memory, feeling, intuition, organs, anticipations, as well as abstract thought. We surrender all this to a very elegant but limited apparatus, which operates fast and accurate, but which lacks many vital human dimensions. True, there are certain forms of drudgery that the computers avoid. That was why the computer was first invented, to perform astronomical calculations that would take hundreds of years to do by ordinary human means. That's a legitimate use of the computer. But no computer is a substitute for the full organism - all our machines are facets or fragments of a human organism. The human organism has a much richer range than any machine will ever be able to simulate. Each machine is only a part of whole man.

 

As Barbara Ward has said, ‘they don't blush and they don't feel.’8

 

Yes, and that was said before by Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist,

in his book What Is Life? He said that the world of science is a world without color, without feeling, without emotion, without things that are characteristic of any kind of organism.

 

But cybernetics - computerized direction of the planet and its masses of people - do you think computers could assist like they did the Club of Rome in creating a catalogue of the planet, or could we do without them?

 

Yes, I definitely think their use is limited. Because our problems really aren't technological ones. Our problems are psychological and moral ones. This involves the building up of inner controls that we have abandoned. It involves a change of mind, a change of our way of life so that it would be fantastic, it sounds fantastic to any sufficiently cultivated person that anybody should spend eight hours or even three hours or even one hour every day in the year before a television set. It should be used when you need it, when something in your life demands it. Just as when one puts on a record in order to hear a particular kind of music. But to have to do that every day in order to survive would be nonsense.

 

Like some people who look eighty percent of their free time at television.

 

Which means eighty percent of their time is spent in not actively living.

 

In The Pentagon of Power you quoted Emerson9 using the laconic metaphor of the earthworm becoming a man.10 Man does not progress by increasing rate of growth or becoming simply a bigger earthworm. But we are having these vast numbers of earthworms born still. Do you think we need a new Jesus or Marx, do you need a new religion, what does man need to save himself?

 

I don't think that religions can be manufactured. I think we are increasingly dominated by a religion which we don't recognize as such. We are under the myth and the religion of the machine. This is a very ancient religion. The dreams and wishes that technology embodies today can all be found in the Egyptian and Sumerian and Babylonian epics. Germ warfare in the Bible, too, practiced by God on the Egyptians. Everything that the gods in these earlier religions did is now being done by man, who therefore foolishly thinks that he is God. What he forgets is that there are two sides to God. The one side of God is called the Devil,

the forces of destruction. The creative and constructive forces are the other side. Usually we ignore this unknown power which is housed in us, for it works through both means. I don't believe in saviors. I don't believe that anybody can create a religion. If religion were created today, it would be something like Christian Science or McLuhanism. It wouldn't be a real religion at all. If the world is to be saved, every man, woman and child will have to play a part.

 

Would you agree with Skinner that the main purpose of life in our day is survival?

 

No, the main purpose of life has always been creativity. Survival will happen if we turn ourselves to creative acts, if we live our lives in a fashion that will persuade us to make the necessary sacrifices. We do not have to persuade a real artist not to live like a stockbroker. He is so much more interested in the work he is doing that he'll often live on bread and water, live in a very modest way, the way that Cézanne11 did, spurning physical goods which are necessary for the great tycoons or the generals in the Pentagon. People who have a creative life can live on very meager rations and often do. Not that poverty is desirable in itself, but if you are sufficiently absorbed in your work, you don't give a damn for how much money is coming in or how much publicity you get from it.

 

That's Paolo Soleri12 from top to foot. How can we promote the young to take this road towards creativity as a absolute necessity for life?

 

First of all by paying attention to them. By turning our attention away from all the noncreative modes of life that we've submitted to. A great deal of our life is deadly routine. This applies to more than the worker in the factory. There is nothing sacred about mass production. We may do much better for ourselves by a much lower standard of production in which the work itself is of interest to the people who are doing it. I regard the assembly line as an old-fashioned form of technology, not as the technology of the future at all.

 

Workers in the factories in Detroit are totally bored and irritated.

 

There is resentment and sabotage, we hear from Detroit, because if you cannot live creatively, you will live destructively. You will try to

destroy everything that's hurting or laming you. This is the point to be remembered. Like Captain Ahab taking revenge on the white whale.

 

Mr. Mumford, what role could the media journalists play in helping to turn towards a more positive way of living?

 

Well, by paying more attention to it. There are two kinds of things that interest newspaper editors and magazine editors. One is the exciting things that seem to catch the public eye because they are unusual. The other is the things that are really important. That news is often not known for a long time. People didn't realize when the great discoveries of the late nineteenth century were being made in physics that their world was changing. If there had been really good journalists at that time, they would have done what the managing editor of the New York Times did back in the early 1920s when Einstein announced his second theory of relativity. Van Anda, who was managing editor of the Times then, put that whole story on the front page of the Times and devoted two or three extra pages to Einstein's discovery. That was the real news, and not news in the old-fashioned sense. In the old-fashioned sense, if somebody had murdered or raped a woman, that would have been the front-page news.

 

They become scarcer, like certain breeds of animals.

 

You know what Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, did when he was faced with the John Hersey's story of Hiroshima, something that no ordinary editor would dare to do. Without telling the advertising department he threw out every bit of advertising in order to print the story of Hiroshima complete in a month's issue of the New Yorker. That is great editing. You cannot do it every day, but you should be able to do it when the occasion calls you.


Vorige Volgende