Lewis Mumford: Difference between revisions

Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian of technology and science. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a tremendously broad career as a writer that also included a period as an influential literary critic. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes.

Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Fred Osborne and Vannevar Bush.

Mumford was born in Flushing, New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912. He studied at the City College of New York and the New School for Social Research, yet he became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree. In 1919 he became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal. He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architechtural criticism and commentary on urban issues.

Two of his early books The Golden Days and Herman Melville: A study of His Life and Vision effectively launched a nation-wide rediscovery of 1850's American transcendentalist authors, which has had lasting impact on contemporary American literary criticism. Soon after, with the book The Brown Decades, he began to establish himself as an authority in US architecture and urban life, which he interpreted in a social context.

In his early writings on urban life, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote that the human race would use electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind. He would later take a more pessimistic stance. His early architechtural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mumford was involved in numerous research positions and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1943 Mumford was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire. He served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years.

Mumford died at his home in Amenia, New York.

Mumford's choice of the word "technics" throughout his work was deliberate. For Mumford, technology is one part of technics. Technics refers to the interplay of a social milieu and technological innovation - the "wishes, habits, ideas, goals" as well as "industrial processes." As Mumford writes at the beginning of Technics and Civilization, "other civilizations reached a high degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly influenced by the methods and aims of technics."

In The Myth of the Machine: technics and human development (1967), Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement. He explains that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction. Modern technology—which he calls 'megatechnics'—evades producing lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, built-in fragility, and frequent superficial "fashion" changes. "Without constant enticement by advertising," he explains, "production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year."

He uses his own refrigerator as an example, explaining 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. Though one cannot bestow any such unqualified upon the design of the contemporary motor car, one 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."

Mumford describes an organic model of technology, or biotechnics, as a contrast to megatechnics. Organic systems direct themselves to "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." Biotechnics models life in seeking balance, wholeness, and completeness.

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. Automobiles become obstacles for other modes of transportation, such as walking, bicycle and light rail, because the roads they use consume so much space and are such a danger to people. Mumford explains that the thousands of maimed and dead each year as a result of automobile accidents are a "ritual sacrifice" the American society makes because of its extreme reliance on highway transport.

Mumford also refers large hierarchical organizations as megamachines—a machine using humans as its components. The builders of the Pyramids, the Roman Empire and the armies of the World Wars are examples. He explains that meticulous attention to accounting and standardization, and elevation of military leaders to divine status are spontaneous features of megamachines throughout the history. He cites such examples as the repetitive nature of Egyptian paintings which feature enlarged Pharaohs and public display of enlarged portraits of dictators such as Mao Tse Tung 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. Technological improvements such as remote control by satellite or radio, instant global communication, and assembly line organizations dampen psychological barriers inherent in every human against the eventual actions of collective organizations, according to Mumford. An example which he uses throughout his works is that of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who conducted many of the logistics behind the Holocaust. Mumford collectively refers to people willing to carry out placidly the extreme goals of these megamachines as "Eichmanns".

One of the better-known studies of Mumford is of the way the clock was created 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 steam engine, writing: "The clock is a piece of machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes."

In his influential book The City in History, which won the National Book Award, Mumford explores the development of urban civilizations. Harshly critical of urban sprawl, Mumford argues that the structure of modern cities is partially responsible for many social problems seen in western society. While pessimistic in tone, Mumford argues that urban planning should emphasize an organic relationship between people and their living spaces.

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 Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Amory Lovins, J. Baldwin, E.F. Schumacher - have been both intellectuals and persons directly involved with technological development and decisions about the use of technology.

• The Story of Utopias (1922)
• Sticks and Stones (1924)
• The Golden Day (1926)
• Herman Melville: A study of His Life and Vision (1929)
• The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (1931)
• "Renewal of Life" series
  • Technics and Civilization (1934)
  • The Culture of Cities (1938)
  • The Condition of Man (1944)
  • The Conduct of Life (1951)
• The City in History (1961) often considered his most important work (Awarded the National Book Award)
• The Highway and the City (1963, essay collection)
• The Myth of the Machine (1967 - 1970, 2 volumes)
• The Urban Prospect (1968, essay collection)
• My Work and Days: A Personal Chronicle (1979)

• Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989)

• Lewis Mumford: A Breif 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