The View from the Pyramid

By Edwin Warner

THE MYTH OF THE MACHINE, VOL. II:

THE PENTAGON OF POWER by Lewis Mumford. 496 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanov/ch. $12.95.

For much of his career, Author-Urbanologist Lewis Mumford, now 75, has been an anachronistic voice from the age of Emerson, waspishly warning against overbearing scientists and runaway technology. Fashion has finally caught up with the man who more than a generation ago was all but alone in fighting superhighways and the spread of concrete. His latest and 24th book, The Pentagon of Power, seems remarkably fresh, as it eloquently elaborates what Mumford has been saying all along.

Mumford betrays no I-told-you-so satisfaction that pollution, congestion and violence have borne out his dire prophecies. He is too concerned with preventing further ravages by what he refers to as the "mechanical world view," the "megamachine," "technological exhibitionism"--never, thank God, the military-industrial complex. He has nothing but contempt for scientists who dream about dashing off into space or recreating life on another planet, when they have made such a botch of this one. He quotes a mathematician defending the costly moon project: "Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will" Why not, suggests Mumford, carry this notion to its logical conclusion: "If man has the power to exterminate all life on earth, he will."

Obsessed by the Sun. Mumford traces the origin of such urges to the 16th century astronomer Galileo, whose unwitting crime was that he left man out of his reckoning. Preoccupied with the orderly behavior of the planets in the heavens, Galileo, and the scientists who followed him, says Mumford, assumed that life on earth could be reduced to neat, predictable patterns. With his customary prophetic fervor, Mumford accuses Galileo of "driving man out of living nature into a cosmic desert even more peremptorily than Jehovah drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden."

The fervent science of Galileo and his followers, says Mumford, was in part a revival of the sun worship of the ancient Egyptians. Other Egyptian parallels strike Mumford's fancy. Just as the Egyptians erected vast sterile pyramids at great cost, so did the industrial age begin to mass-produce valueless goods. A far-fetched analogy? Mumford finds pyramids lurking everywhere in modern life. He includes an illustration of a supercity proposed by Buckminster Fuller that looks like a pyramid but lacks any perceptible improvement in living conditions. Even the manned space capsule "corresponds exactly to the innermost chamber of the great pyramids, where the mummified body of the Pharaoh, surrounded by the miniaturized equipment necessary for magical travel to heaven, was placed."

Life in the Ruins. The biggest pyramid of all today, writes Mumford, is the welfare state, which has created a helpless, dependent populace by ministering to its every material need--a common charge. Yet it is easy to fault the welfare state now that its benefits are taken for granted. What about those outsiders--blacks, for example--who still yearn to sample its delights? Are their stomachs to be denied for the sake of their souls? Mumford is silent on the subject. It falls outside the angle of his vision. He is persuaded that the overcentralized society cannot be reformed or modified, only dismantled.

He recognizes that an effort is afoot to dismantle it, led by rebellious youth. Though he approves of their yearning to reestablish contact with organic life, Mumford is too rigorous a thinker to believe that their movement offers a serious alternative to the megamachine. It is too machinelike itself, with youth running in herds that differ little from those that cram corporation offices. Theirs is not a new consciousness but a very ancient and dubious one: a primordial desire to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. But a new start, says Mumford, requires people who have digested the lessons of the past, not rejected them as irrelevant.

From the Top. What's to be done? Nothing in the mass. Individuals, small groups or communities must "nibble at the edges of the power structure by breaking down routine and defying regulations." Individuals must summon the courage to renounce the bribe of the welfare state and demand more "continent production"--in other words a slower rate of economic output, a goal now being considered for the first time by economists. Mumford hopes the new continence will slowly infiltrate and change the organs of the state just as Christianity transformed Roman society.

Mumford's vision is as Utopian as the "higher and farther" dreams of the technocrats. True believers are free to choose between the two. More skeptical readers may feel that Mumford, over the years of piling book upon book, has created something of a pyramid himself. If the view from the top is chilly, it makes more impressive those moments when Mumford climbs down and fixes his eye on his enduring earthly dream: humanity in intimate, loving touch with nature.

Edwin Warner

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