Another Mumford Reading Excerpt: If The Sleepers Awaken

The following excerpt is the final part of Chapter Fourteen: The New Organum, with the previous excerpt being the first. If you are short of good reading material and really want to get to the root of our many interrelated crises then this is a great place to start, in fact this is probably the single-most important work I have read thus far that sufficiently explores our crisis of consciousness. In that I am nearing the end of the second volume of The Myth of the Machine this will likely be the last excerpt. 

Here are the previous excerpts from The Myth of the Machine, again as far as I know these are the only excerpts to be found on all of the web:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/07/another-mumford-reading-excerpt-new.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-mumford-reading-excerpt.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-excerpt-lewis-mumford-myth-of.html

Again, I apologize if there are errors, as I am reproducing this word for word directly from the book. 

Chapter 14: The New Organum

6: IF THE SLEEPERS AWAKEN

The stoppages and breakdowns that have occurred have a certain potential educational value, for they disclose the susceptibility of the whole system to human intervention, if only of a negative kind. Disobedience is the infant's first step toward autonomy, and even infantile destruction may temporarily awaken confidence in the individual's capacity to change his environment. But the well publicized devastations of a world war or the threat of greater nuclear catastrophes still did not shock mankind into taking sufficient steps for its own self-protection: witness the present pitiful substitute for a responsible world organization, the United Nations - purposely crippled in advance by the 'Great Powers'.

The realization that the entire system is now breaking down might have come about more swiftly if the professional bodies that should have been monitoring our technology - the engineers, the biologists, the physicians - had not so completely identified themselves with the power system's objectives. So until lately they have been criminally negligent in anticipating or even reporting what has actually been taking place - and in the case of nuclear fallout and nuclear wastes have often deliberately, in conformity to the 'national policy', minimized their dangers.

Not that occasional warning voices were absent, even at an early date: I have already cited the examples of Henry Adams and Frederick Soddy, to say nothing of H. G. Wells. But when an eminent British engineer, Sir Alfred Ewing, suggested in 1933 that there might well be a moratorium on invention, in order to assimilate and integrate the existing mass of inventions and evaluate further proposals, he was hooted as a crank, demanding a foolish and impossible sacrifice.

Few of Ewing's contemporaries realized then that a purely mechanical system whose processes can neither be retarded nor redirected nor halted, that has no internal mechanism for warning of defects or correcting them (feedback), and that can only be accelerated is, as we have all too late found out, a menace to mankind. Yet anyone familiar with the history of inventions would know that great industrial corporations have frequently bought up patents - like the early one for an automatic telephone system - in order to suppress them, or have diverted research from areas where new inventions might threaten capital investment or reduce inordinate profits. (Note the studious indifference to developing more efficient accumulators essential to the electric motor car and the use of windpower.) There was nothing unrealistic in Ewing's proposal - except the hope that it might be carried out by those still spellbound by the myth of the machine. Had Ewing's warning been generally heeded, the world would now be a healthier and safer place.

During the past three decades the involuntary failures of the power system have become increasingly lethal, and they have been occurring with a frequency and a force that corresponds to the dynamism of the individual parts. As these brownouts and blackouts and breakdowns continue to occur, with disastrous consequences to both the habitat and the human population, such a change may take place as was noted in London during the Blitz, a comparable ordeal. At that time psychiatrists observed that their anxious, neurotic patients, when confronted with a real danger they could neither evade in fantasy nor flee from, began to function as competent human beings, able at last to face up to their difficulties.

The situation that mankind now faces collectively shows a certain resemblance to that confronted by the individual in the midst of a neurosis. Before his disturbance comes into the open various events, unrecognized by the patient, have paved the way for his illness. But as long as he is able to conceal his condition from himself and perform his daily tasks without exhibiting suicidal depression or uncontrollable  hostility to those around him, he may be unwilling to consult a physician, or re-examine his life. the first step toward recognizing his state and seeking help usually begins with a visible collapse, bodily or mental, often both.

At this point the method of psychoanalysis offers a clue that may be of value in handling the present collective breakdown: this lies in the effort to trace present symptoms back to earlier mishaps or injuries, deeply buried in the psyche, difficult to uncover, which deflected the organism from its normal path of growth. By bringing such traumas into consciousness , the patient may better understand his own nature and acquire insight into the conditions under which he can, through is own efforts, make the most of the potentialities that his personal life and his culture offer him.

The unbaring of man's historic past during the last two centuries may well prove a more important contribution to man's survival than all his other scientific knowledge. This reclamation of human history will involve, as Erich Neumann has emphasized, absorbing into man's conscious existence the evils that, if unidentified and unrecognized, will otherwise continue to thwart him. Our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities.

The realization that the physical breakdowns and subjective demoralizations of Western civilization derive from the same ideological failures is now at last taking hold. But for a dynamic response to this situation, something like a universal awakening sufficient to produce an internal readiness for a profounder transformation, must take place. Such a reaction, one must honestly confess, has never yet occurred in history solely as a result of rational thinking and educational indoctrination: nor is it likely to occur in this way now - at least within the narrow time limits one must allow, if greater breakdowns and demoralizations are to be circumvented.

Half a century ago H. G. Wells observed, correctly enough, that mankind faced a race between education and catastrophe. But what he failed to recognize was that something like catastrophe has become the condition for an effective education. This might seem like a dismal and hopeless conclusion, were it not for the fact that the power system, through its own overwhelming achievements, has proved expert in creating breakdowns and catastrophes.

Today's technological breakdowns are no less ominous that the growing resistance of the personnel to performing the unrewarding labor necessary to keep the system in operation: but they may bring compensatory reactions, for the give the human personality a chance to function. This stunningly took place during the Northeast power breakdown of November 1965. Suddenly, as in E. M. Forster's fable, The Machine Stops. Millions of people, caught without either power or light, immobilized in railroad trains, subways, skyscraper elevators, moved spontaneously into action, without waiting for the system to recover or for orders to come from above. "While the city of bricks and mortar was dead", 'The New Yorker' reported, "the people were more alive than ever".

For many this stoppage proved an exhilarating experience: autos, which can function by their own power and light, kept moving: citizens supplemented policemen in directing traffic: trucks took on passengers: strangers helped one another: people found that their legs would transport them efficiently when wheels failed: one set of young men and women gaily formed a procession, carrying candles, chanting in mock solemnity, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing!" All the latent human powers that a perfect, smooth-running mechanical organization suppresses began to function again. What seemed a calamity turned into an opportunity: when the machine stopped, life recovered. The kind of self-confidence and self-reliance generated by such an experience is what is needed to cut the power complex down to human size, and bring it under control. "Let man take over!"

Admittedly the partial disasters of war, though no longer locally limited, had through the ages grown too familiar to bring about a sufficient reaction. During the last decade, fortunately, there has been a sudden, quiet unpredictable awakening to prospects of a total catastrophe. The unrestricted increase in population, the over-exploitation of megatechnical inventions, the inordinate wastages of compulsory consumption, and the consequent deterioration of the environment through wholesale pollution, poisoning, bulldozing, to say nothing of the more irremediable waste products of atomic energy, have at last begun to create the reaction needed to overcome them.

This awakening has become planet-wide. The experiences of congestion, environmental degradation, and human demoralization now fall within the compass of everyone's daily life. Even in the open country, small communities are now forced to take political action against canny enterprisers seeking to dump wastes from distant cities in rural areas that already have difficulties enough in coping with their own rubbish and sewage. The extent of the approaching catastrophe, its visible nearness, and its dire inevitability unless counter-measures are rapidly taken, have done far more than the vivid prospects of sudden nuclear extinction to bring on a sufficient psychological response. In this prospect, the swifter the degradation, the more likely effective measures against it will be sought.

Yet even granting that, in the first shock of realizing mankind's plight, hitherto unthinkable political measures may be proposed, the question remains whether the massive human participation needed will actually occur. Any program sufficient to reverse the destructive success of technological affluence will demand not merely drastic restrictions; it will demand economic and social changes directed toward producing goods and services, modes of work and education and recreation, profoundly different from those offered by the power complex.

Reformers who would treat the campaign against environmental and human degradation solely in terms of improved technological facilities, like the reduction of gasoline exhaust in motor cars, see only a small part of the problem. Nothing less that a profound re-orientation of our vaunted technological 'way of life' will save this planet from becoming a lifeless desert. And without such a wide-ranging preliminary alteration of personal desires, habits, and ideals the necessary physical measures for mankind's protection - to say nothing of its further development - cannot conceivable be carried out.

On this matter, one dare not become over-optimistic even though the first stir of a human awakening seems actually to be taking place. The unwillingness of millions of cigarette smokers to free themselves from their addiction to cigarettes despite the incontestable evidence of the probable consequences in lung cancer, gives a hint of the difficulties we shall face in redeeming the planet - and ourselves - for life. Our present addiction to private motor transportation alone may prove equally hard to break until every traffic artery is permanently clogged and every city is ruined.

For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers. This order of change is as hard for most people to conceive as was the change from the classic power complex of Imperial Rome to that of Christianity, or, later, from supernatural medieval Christianity to the machine-modeled ideology of the seventeenth century. But such changes have repeatedly occurred all through history; and under catastrophic pressure they may occur again. Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.