Back to the Luddites?

THE MYTH OF THE MACHINE by Lewis Mumford. 342 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $8.95.

Deep in the breast of every intellectual burns the desire to play God; to know the symbiosis of mind and body that led to the walking, talking, feeling creature called man; to create a total rationale for his actions and to predict his destiny.

Thus Culture Critic Lewis Mumford (The City in History, The Highway and the City) decides that present ideas of man's inevitable dependence on science and technology are nonsense. Modern man, he says, is a victim of a "radical misinterpretation" of human development. Furthermore, the machine will either turn him into a collectivized, automatic non-person or blow him back to the jungle. The Myth of the Machine is hybrid literature--part history, part anthropology, part poetry. It is a violent, splenetic attack on much that has happened in civilization for the past several millennia, and it occasionally approaches the absurd. But the range of its erudition and imagination makes it good intellectual entertainment. It is a book to start arguments and speculation.

In the Beginning the Word. Currently accepted theory, says Mumford, suggests that man has moved logically from the primeval invention of tools to conquest of nature and finally to detachment from organic habitat by means of ultra-machines. With support from a big-think bibliography of 370 sources, Mumford argues that making and using tools didn't signal man's rise from slime. Dreams, language, ritual--all first products of the mind--did. And because the mind is father to the hand, it can reverse the mechanized march to doom. How that might happen will have to wait until Mumford's sequel; this book ends in the 16th century with Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Copernicus metaphorically anticipating the end machine--the bomb.

Already anthropologists have attacked Mumford as an armchair expert and dismissed his notions on the origins of speech as unknowable. He says language comes from dreams. "Before man achieved speech, his own unconscious alone must have been the only impelling voice he recognized, speaking to him in its own teasingly contradictory and confused images. Only a kind of dull doggedness can perhaps account for man's ability to get the better of these treacherous gifts and make something of them," and only by command of language was man able to embrace technics and articulate the significance of his achievements. Words told man what he wanted and got.

The Great Container. Primitive rituals, continues Mumford, were "basic to the whole development of human culture"; they stabilized Paleolithic man through repetitive acts that produced predictable effects. Early man was first a collector and later a hunter; from animals he learned how to gather food before discovering how to kill for it. Kings created the prototype machines from people: they organized manpower to build monuments and wage war.

Too often Mumford sounds like a narrow literary intellectual, or he ignores obvious holes in his theories. It is provincial today to say "language is the great container of culture." What about other forms of communication--music? painting? mathematics? Mumford describes kings as the first technological totalitarians--but tends to forget that kings could rule only from bases of commonly held beliefs and aspirations. How does Mumford know that "mil lennia passed [after Paleolithic man] before man would take the life of his own kind in cold blood"?

Mumford finds his devil and feels his great passion as he confronts the "mega-machine"--political, economic, bureaucratic, royal powers organized into vast enterprises. He is slightly hysterical in denouncing the U.S. military establishment as a megamachine and "the minds now in charge of [it] have already proved as open to ... corrupt fantasies and psychotic breakdowns as those of the Bronze Age kings." The myth of the machine is based on a belief that the megamachine is "absolutely irresistible and ultimately beneficial" as well as beyond resistance. Not so, says Mumford. The benefits of the Machine Age are a fraud. Mechanized production makes work dull.

5,000 Years Late. Mumford's profoundly reactionary answer to the megamachine is to throw a monkey wrench into it and send it down a time tunnel. Go back to Benedictine monasteries, where work was a "byword for zealous efficiency and formal perfection." Discover new prophets of "modest, humane disposition," like Jesus and Confucius. Establish new routines, such as the Hebrew Sabbath that "found a way of obstructing the megamachine and challenging its inflated claims." Abandon the modern constitutional equivalents of ancient kingships and revert to Neolithic culture. In other words, Mumford would perfect man with weaving, pottery and thatched-village anarchy.

To a few modern Luddites, this may seem like an attractive idea. But man had that chance 5,000 years ago and muffed it. Mumford may as well forget that fantasy and address himself to the real problem: how to plug the megamachine into the circuitry of 20th century hopes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.