Right now I'm
very slowly reading
The Pentagon of Power by Lewis Mumford.
Its difficult to read book due to the numerous factoids and abstracts but well worth it. Mumford is very underrated imo. Lewis Mumford should have the fame, hype and accolades which Karl Marx and Keynes have for entirely different reasons.
I'll try to quote a few excerpts from Lewis Mumford to show how his rhetoric differs from other economists.
The dogma of ‘increasing wants’ as an indispensible basis for further industrial progress. Instead of the duty to work, we now have the duty to consume. To ensure rapid absorbtion of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility.
The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious and fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principle of the power complex. Not the least effort of this system is that of replacing selectivity and quantitative restriction by indiscriminate and incontinent consumption.
Thus the shorter working day promised by this system is already turning into a cheat. In order to achieve the higher level of consumption required, the members of the family must take on extra jobs. […] The effect, ironically, is to turn the newly won six- or seven-hour day to twelve or fourteen hours; so in effect, the worker is back where he started, with more material goods than ever before, but with less time to enjoy them or the promised leisure.
If all these goods are in themselves sound and individually desirable, on what grounds can we condemn the system that totalizes them? So say the official spokesmen. All these goods remain valuable if more important human concerns are not overlooked or eradicated. Unqualified successes in over-quantification.
When a scientist in good repute, like Dr. Lee du Bridge, can defend the wholesale immediate use of pesticides, bactericides, and possibly equally dangerous pharmaceuticals, by saying that it would take ten years to test them sufficiently to certify their value and innocuousness and that ‘industry cannot wait’ – it is obvious that his rational commitments to science are secondary to financial pressures, and that the safeguarding of human life is for industry not a matter of major concern.
The ironic effect of quantification is that many of the most desirable gifts of modern technics disappear when distributed en masse, or when – as with the television – they are used too constantly and too automatically. No umbilical cord attached man to nature: neiter ‘security’ nor ‘adjustment’ were the guidelines to human development.
Patrick Geddes: Conditions of degeneration in the organic world are approximately known. These conditions are often of two distinct kinds, deprivation of food, light, etc. so leading to imperfect nutrition and enervation; the other, a life of repose, with abundant supply of food and decreased exposure to the dangers of the environment. It is noteworthy that while the former only depresses, or at most distinguishes the specific type, the latter, through the disuse of the nervous and other structures etc. which such a simplification of life involves, brings about that far more insidious and through degeneration seen in the life history of myriads of parasites.
THE PENTAGON OF POWER, Lewis Mumford, 1970
...
As early as 1066, when William the Conqueror seized England, there were 8,000 watermills, serving less than one million people. At the very modest estimate of 2.5 horsepower per mill, this was twice the energy that was available through the assemblage of the 100,000 men who built the Great Pyramid, and probably more than twenty times in relation to the population of their respective countries.
Even in backward mining communities, as late as the sixteenth century more than half the recorded days were holidays; while for Europe as a whole, the total number of holidays, including Sunday, came to 189, a number even greater than those enjoyed by Imperial Rome. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water or food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of mind.
Where capitalism prospered, it established three main canons for successful economic enterprise: the calculation of quantity, the observation and the regimentation of time (‘Time is Money’), and the concentration on abstract pecuniary awards. Its ultimate values – Power, Profit, Prestige – derive from these sources and all of them can be traced back, under the flimsiest of disguises, to the Pyramid Age.
Leonardo: “men shall walk without moving [motorcar], they shall speak with those absent [telephone], they shall hear those who do not speak [phonograph]”. Is the intelligence alone, however purified and decontaminated, an adequate agent for doing justice to the needs and purposes of life?
Leonardo, for example, invented the submarine [but] he deliberately suppressed the invention “on the account of the evil nature in men, who would practice assassination at the bottom of the sea”. Inventions in Medieval Age: velocipede and military tank (Fontana), diving suit and infernal machine (Konrad Keyeser von Eichstadt), toxic gas
John Stuart Mill – ‘Principles of Economies’: it is doubtful if all the machinery then available had yet lightened the day’s labor of a single being. Within a century or two, the ideological fabric that supported the ancient megamachine had been reconstructed on a new and improved model. Power, speed, motion, standardization, mass production, quantification, regimentation, precision, uniformity, astronomical regularity, control, above all control – these became the passwords of modern society in the new Western style
TECHNICS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, Lewis Mumford, 1967
